I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

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

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.

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

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.