Novelists Are Always Resisting Autobiographical

One Of The Reasons That Art Is Important To Me Is Sometimes It Actually Feels More Coherent Than Life. It Orders The Chaos.

I Was Born Twice: First, As A Baby Girl, On A Remarkably Smogless Detroit Day In January Of 1960; And Then Again, As A Teenage Boy, In An Emergency Room Near Petoskey, Michigan, In August Of 1974.

Where Else Would She Feel More Comfortable Than In This Subterranean Realm Where People Wrote Down What They Couldn't Say, Where They Gave Voice To Their Most Shameful Longings And Knowledge?

If I Write A Character, Instead Of Looking From The Outside, Like Maybe A Journalist Would, Trying To Describe Them Physically And Figuring Out What Kind Of Things They Might Be Interested In Or Have In Their House, I Don't Really Do It That Way. I Try To Feel What It Would Be Like To Be Inside This Person, To Be Them.

We Knew, Finally, That The Girls Were Really Women In Disguise, That They Understood Love And Even Death, And That Our Job Was Merely To Create The Noise That Seemed To Fascinate Them.