Interviews

One of the two great powers of writing fiction is the capacity to invent, to activate the imagination and access realities unlike our own

By contextualizing my experience, I hoped to offer new dimensions to the conversation around adoption.

Do I want to be writing the way that I think literary fiction ought to be written? That’s starting to not seem so interesting to me anymore.

Some of my favorite moments and scenes are when characters do something surprising that bends toward humor or something selfless that reaches for connection.

There’s truth in everything we write, but there’s a lot of fabrication and fantasy, and you don’t have that freedom with science.

Just as my body that might ache all night is the same body that gives me pleasure. And I feel it aching because I am alive and living in it.

We believe we grant access to our lives to others; I think that is an illusion.

Being affected in those ways can give us motivation to make sure that other people aren’t hurt in the same ways that we’ve been hurt.

Reading a new book by an admired writer offers the chance to recapture the familiar pleasures of their previous work—the equivalent of ordering your favorite dish at a restaurant again, comparing it to the version that only lives in your…

I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.

Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask “why,” and as a writer I’m just as interested.

Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.