Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

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.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

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.

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

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

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