Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.