I'm Always Hungry For People.

I Try Not To Think Too Much Or Be Too Impatient, And Let The Back Of My Brain Do Its Mysterious Work.

I Had A Series Of Terrible Jobs, Whatever Would Allow Me To Write For Four Hours During The Day. During That Time I Wrote Three Novels - All Of Which Were Extraordinarily Poor. I Decided After That To Go And Get My Mfa.

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.

I Have A Feeling That Books Are A Lot Like People - They Change As You Age, So That Some Books That You Hated In High School Will Strike You With The Force Of A Revelation When You're Older.

I'm An Anxious Person In General, But Something About Being Pregnant And Awaiting The Release Of My First Book, The Monsters Of Templeton, Made Me Into An Insane Anxious Person. I Didn't Sleep At Night. I Ended Up Sleeping All Day. In A Strange Way I Felt Like The World Was Going To End. I Found Myself So Deeply Depressed At Times That I Started To Read About Happiness, And That Took Me Into Books About Idealism And Utopianism. Reading Books About People Who Tried To Build Utopian Societies Of Different Kinds Gave Me A Kind Of Lift.