And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.

People have invoked the ghost of Hemingway quite a few times in writing about the book. I could get into sticky territory here if I let myself go on about this subject. The more I hear it, the more it rankles, frankly.

I think of this a lot in the terms of books. Of course there's a big to-do culturally about e-books versus print books, sales models. The paradigm has changed but my perspective on it is that there's not going to be another paradigm to alight on because everything will continue to evolve so quickly that our brains won't be able to keep up with it.

Most of my writing is an effort, one way or another, to figure something out about myself, and often when I read dialogue between my characters I recognize it as a discussion between two aspects of my own personality, aspects which are too often at odds.

Whenever someone asks me craft questions like that I feel like I can give one of two answers. I can give the academy answer and say that it was very deliberate and I had a plan in mind and I executed that plan exactly to the letter. But this isn't the case.

When you're a child - and my understanding of it is very basic - but when you're a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they're there, they're there, but if they don't form by a certain age, they're not going to.

All of which raises the question – your task, burden, privilege, call it what you like – a question which men and women, great and not-so of every color, creed and sexual persuasion have asked since they first had the language to do so, and probably before: Does Anything I Do Matter?