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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

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.