But I've Married A Deeply

As A Person, I Do Ascribe To A Lot Of Magical Thinking Myself.

I'm A Private Person, A Shy Person. Sometimes, Reading For Eleven Hours Straight Feels To Me Like The Perfect Way To Spend A Day.

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.

As With Most Of My Work, I Started From The Abstract, From Research, Building An Intellectual Model That Slowly Became Internalized When The Characters Came Alive. It's Fascinating What Happens To The Model You've So Assiduously Assembled When Characters Are Allowed To Run Rampant: Things You Thought Essential Are Broken And Other Things Are Vastly Improved.

Our Human Impulse Is To Control Everything, But Fiction Seems To Me To Be About Allowing An Element Of Mystery Into The Text.