The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.

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

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

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time

These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating