It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.

I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don't focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.

I don't want the success to go away. I don't want it to seem unearned.

Writing, at its best and truest, can offer solace and salvation for both readers and writers.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.