The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

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

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

Safe from the Neighbors is a novel of unusual richness and depth, one that's as wise about the small shocks within a marriage as it is about the troubled history of Mississippi. Steve Yarbrough is a formidably talented novelist, shuttling between the past and present with a grace that feels effortless.

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.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.