I’m less afraid of somebody camping under an overpass, trying to score, trying just to eke out another day, than somebody living in Bel Air or Simi Valley, who comes to believe they’re losing status in the world and decides they need to do something about it. Those people terrify me.
People are bothered by all of this, and I admit I am both irritated and amused by it. I think I like the bother, the trouble. It makes us ask — what is a novel?
I realized that writing from a place of grief was so much more useful than the angry stance I had taken before.
When a book is almost fully formed, it starts becoming like a third person in a way, or a space that has its own internal logic, almost capable of making its own decisions.
I love the elasticity of words and how you can put them together to create things. It’s like a big LEGO set.
I am mean to them, aren’t I?
But my inner critic is the one who writes in the first place.
Loving art was a huge part of why I became a socialist. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and I spent a lot of my youth really arguing for the arts.
There’s theoretical forgiveness, and then there’s personal forgiveness.
This connects to an anxiety I’ve had since childhood about wanting to record everything that’s ever happened, which is perhaps simply a fear of my own mortality, as well as the mortality of everything in this beautiful world.