Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.
Alaska is what happens when Willy Wonka and the witch from Hansel and Gretel elope, buy a place together upstate, renounce their sweet teeth, and turn into health fanatics.
As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.
For me, nothing brings out my ‘born yesterday’ idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.
I can’t see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people.
I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.
I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it’s a paragraph.
I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don’t really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.
I think it’s hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.
I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn’t grow up here.
I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.
I write on weekends, on vacation, and, really – on deadline and on my floor. Both terrible for the back.
For a long time I wanted to draw, but I could never get the proportions right. My still life sketches were the artistic equivalent of someone who has misjudged the space constraints of a postcard, the handwriting shrinking uncomfortably at the bottom.
For the average person, taken to their sick bed, it takes a serious bout of pneumonia or a full body cast to completely forget the life they had prior to falling off the rollercoaster. I, however, will do this over a paper cut on my thumb, obsessing of said cut and being generally consumed by it.
My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book ‘Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers’ – this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford’s wire hangers look like pool noodles.
My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.
Normally, I am a vocal advocate for ‘looking both ways’ and ‘knowing the size of one’s own body.’ But working, socialising and simply running errands in Manhattan, means I am bound to break my own rules on occasion.
Personal technology has given us the freedom of being able to do whatever we want – and in the case of celebrities and athletes, whomever they want. But it can also serve as a humiliation jetpack.
I don’t understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.
Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor’s appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.