Novelist

There's a certain point in chemistry and in calculus where I reached the end of my abilities, and I realized, 'This is where I'm stupid.'

An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.

You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.

I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.

I'm not despairing of love at all.

My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.'

I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town.

Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.

My country is nothing if not diverse.

You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive.

I wake up at 10. I have coffee, and then I spend a half an hour on the computer, where I read newspapers and progressive blogs. I have to tear myself away, or I'll spend all day reading.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.

Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.

Some books inspire one to read, and some inspire one to write; for selfish reasons, I'm always looking for the latter.

'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.

I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends.

There must be times when people look in the mirror and they realize they're 60.

I grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much.