How do we protect ourselves from ourselves, if we don’t look at what we’ve done?
Writing is gratitude. It is like writing a thank you note to the world.
With our generation, there isn’t any shame. We’ll say anything. We’ll say what we make an hour, or we’ll say what our rent is; we’ll just share it.
The people that you might have been, or the things that you might have done, or the things that happened that you wish didn’t happen — those are the real ghosts.
Our use of the term paranoia is fabulously, very complexly and historically screwed up.
I wanted to write a novel about Guantanamo, to where no one else had to write another novel about it again. I think that’s the way everybody should write.
In the book, stories are, of necessity, told in a linear way; one thing is narrated, then another. In the immersive text I don’t have that constraint, and multiple storylines can happen in parallel, inviting the reader to choose between them.
“There are moments in stories by Bulgakov and by Garcia Marquez, both of whom I love, where things are never presented as potential facts: they’re just facts. I think that The Tiger’s Wife ended up dealing with whether or not something is potential fact.”
I write about people who are wondering about what it means to be a good person. That’s probably the main question that characters in this novel seem to struggle with: how are they going to manage to be happy, given that people die?
Wall Street is everywhere, in a sense. You could occupy Corona Park in Queens and say you’ve occupied Wall Street, because it is there too.