My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.