In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

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.

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

Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.

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

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.