I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out ‘David Copperfield,’ and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, ‘This is what reading should be.’ I’m utterly transported out of my current situation.
I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works – which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I’ve used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.
I grew up as a step-kid, always a little outside, always trying hard to follow and fit in. But over time, I’ve come to feel that my tendency toward self-erasure is a deep and real part of me. I think I’d be this way no matter how I grew up.
I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I’m always trying to access when I write.
Music makes time fall away like almost nothing else. You hear a song from another moment of your life, and it really is like you’re still there.
I blurb a lot of books by women, and I’m eager to provide encouragement and support for young women.
You can research until you’re falling asleep, but that still doesn’t mean you’re really fluent in the material.
But I always need to identify with a character to write about him or her – and by ‘identify,’ I mean see the world through that person’s eyes and have a strong sense of the inner logic of their acts and decisions, wacky or wrongheaded though they might be. In that sense, I think there’s some of me in all of them.
If you can write any way and it’s working out, just bow down in gratitude.
Comparison is painful. Don’t be cowed by other people’s pretty pictures. When you feel unimpressive, or irrelevant, that has nothing to do with what you’re actually capable of.
When I’m not writing, I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening.
I’ve never been that confident. I don’t tend to think, swaggeringly, ‘I’m going to ace this.’ It’s just not who I am.
The part of the process that’s exciting to me is feeling like I’m in a place I’ve never been before, in every way. Without that, I don’t know if I’d be a writer.
I have a tendency to coddle my sons because I want to keep them safe, but I also want them to be strong and independent and curious and bold, and I worry that my coddling is going to have exactly the opposite effect.
I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.
I’m a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
Training readers to expect a voice or subject matter from me would interfere with the reinvention I crave. At the same time, I feel almost too able to disappear at times.
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship – that’s how hegemony works.
I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.
In terms of rock and roll, I’m often drawn to louder, rougher stuff; maybe that’s my history as a punk rock wannabee showing itself! Honestly, though, I’m not one of those people who listens to music constantly. I really love silence.
People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had ‘The Who’ and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the ’80s had other songs and bands. It’s a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
Not to brag, but I do think I’ve gotten pretty adept on PowerPoint… except that I can’t figure out how to use Excel!
‘Look at Me’ started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That’s an abstract idea; you don’t think that’s going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
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