My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.