I don't feel like I possess a particular political intelligence, and when I read work that does, I feel like somebody else is going to have the right political thing to say. As a citizen, I feel an enormous need to respond, and immediately post-election, I felt like, What is my work worth? Should I quit what I'm doing and go work on the 2018 election now? How is what I'm putting into the world meaningful?

In a way, you normalize your own childhood to yourself, so I never thought about how much I wrote as a kid. So I was there, confronted with it - so many notebooks, so many tiny plays. Every week we put on a play. We had a big futon, so my sister and I would use the futon as our stage, and I wrote little skits and made her faint because I found it so funny.

You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.

I'm klutzy, and I don't embarrass easily.

When my sister decided that she wanted to act, I was so nervous for her. She's doing great, but I have a lot of friends at every level of success as an actor, and we all go through periods of time where they feel like their worth isn't within their own control. That's a horrible feeling for an adult to have.

If I was born into a household with anxiety about money, I wouldn't have had as much freedom to be in my own world. So it's impossible for me to divorce the privilege of my childhood from the other things.

I'm used to very low-budget situations. In 'The Exploding Girl,' we were literally changing in Starbucks because we didn't have trailers.