The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.