death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is

I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

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

I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.