I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.