Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, Pizza, pastry.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.