Sex Is A Good Starting Point For

Sex Makes Things Strained. There Are Lovely People In Oneida, But Everyone Was Married To Everyone Else. And You Had Fathers And Mothers Watching Their Twelve-year-old Daughters Being Inducted Into The Group Marriage By Sixty-five-year-old Men. There Are Creepy Aspects Of A Lot Of Intentional Communities When It Comes To Sex.

A Lot Of My Work Comes From A Place Of Despair Or Fear. I Often Write In Order To Gain Some Sort Of Control Over Aspects Of My Life Or The World That Seem Too Dark To Look At Directly.

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.

I Don't Believe That Fiction Is Dead. I Know There Are Some People Who Believe That It's An Outdated Art Form, And That To Express Truth Today You Need To Work In Different Forms, To Write Books Where It's Perhaps Not Clear What's Fiction And What's Memoir. I Have Nothing Against Those Books And Love Many Of Them Very Much. But We Have Enough Space For Everyone, Traditional Realists And Hybrid Writers, And Experimental Writers All.

I Feel Like In American Fiction We're Moving Out Of A Period Of Intense Irony, And I'm Very Glad About That. I Feel Like Irony Is Fine For Its Own Sake But Shouldn't Be The Sole Reason To Write A Book. It Has Been An Ironic World View: That's The Best Way I Can Describe It. I'm A Fan Of Earnestness. I Feel Like There's A New Wave Of Earnestness And I'd Be Happy If I'm Some Small Part Of That.