I See History As Really Cyclical In

We Need The Skeletons Of Other Stories To Understand Our Own, Sometimes.

I'm Feminist In That I Believe That There Should Be Equality Between Men And Women. I Get Deeply Frustrated On A Daily Basis By The Enormous Gender Divide In The U.s. Literary World. But I Don't Know How To Deal With It, So I Don't Tend To Say Much About It.

The Trouble Is That America's Become A Utopia Accessible Only To Some People. Others Get Trampled On. Perhaps It's A Problem Of Size. Robin Dunbar, An Anthropologist, Once Gave The Ideal Number Of A Given Community As 148. That Seems About Right To Me. There's Something Idealistic About That - In A Group Of 148 People You Can Get To Know Everybody.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

It's More Like I Write Multiple First Drafts, Handwritten. So With My First Novel, I Wrote Whole Drafts From Different Points Of View. There Are Different Versions Of That Novel In A Drawer On Loose-leaf Sheets. I Won't Even Look At The First Draft While I'm Writing The Second, And I Won't Look At The Second Before Writing The Third.