When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.