Plot Was Always Secondary In My Mind.

What If You Believed That Everything In Life Was Like A Prize? What If You Thought Of The World As A Big Random Drawing, And You Were Always Winning Things, The World Offering Them Up With A Big Grin, Like An Emcee's: Here You Go, Hollis. Here Is A Motorcycle. Here Is A Little Boy Who Loves You. Here Is A Weird Experience, Here Is Something Bad That You Should Mull Over Because It Will Make You A Better Person. What If You Could Think That Life Was This Free Vacation You'd Won, And You Won Just Because You Happened To Be Alive?

I'm Certainly Very Influenced By What You Would Call "contemporary Headline Horror," Stuff That Is True Crime Or For One Reason Or Another Catches Our Attention In The Media, Those Strange Cases That We End Up Obsessing About. I'm Always Influenced By Weird Anecdotes And News. And, You Know, Lastly, Probably Things That Have Happened To Me In My Own Life.

I'd Read An Enormous Amount But Had Spent So Much Time In My Own Head That I Didn't Have Extensive Social Skills. Suddenly I Was In This World Where I Was Surrounded By These Incredibly Polished And Wealthy Kids Who Had Gone To Prep Schools, And I Felt Daunted By Them. I Don't Think People Were Aware Of How Full Of Anxiety I Was... For A Long Time I Felt Like I Was Living In A Place Where I Shouldn't Have Been.

I've Had A Lot Of Different Lives. I Was Adopted, I Grew Up In Nebraska, And Then I Went To Northwestern... Then I Had This Really Extraordinary, Different Life Than My Parents.

Writing Short Stories Was Kind Of Like I Was Cheating The Whole Time, In Some Way. I Went Back And Forth Between Writing The Novels And Sort Of Sneaking Out To Work On Stories Occasionally. These Stories Were Written Over The Last 10 Years Or So, As I Was Taking Breaks From The Novels I've Written.