I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
I don’t think it’s shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.
High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you’re there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.
You know, the point of a novel – or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people’s lives and inside their personal experiences.
When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.
I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets – I think the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there’s this idea that it’s even more powerful. It really is, not just someone like me, but another version of me.
Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.
There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.
The fact is that in this day and age I don’t think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
In life we’re most hell-bent on proving things that we’re not really sure are true.
Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
I’m able to separate fiction and reality. I guess it remains to be seen if other people are.
I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
I just write the books that I think I would want to read.
I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.
If I’m at somebody’s house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.