I just cannot stand an unmade bed.
Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.
When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.
When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.
I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se.
When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry.
We're such imperfect beings. I think that's more often the case than not.
In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.
I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way.
I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire.
As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it.
As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom.
If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner.
My mom used to keep all her Christmas cards in a basket bedecked with red ribbon, and I loved to look at them all and read all the letters.
No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person.
It feels like my books come true. I write these things, and then they kind of end up happening. I wasn't divorced, for example, when I wrote a book about divorce.
I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore.
Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.
My favorite splurge is homemade chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream or a Sausage McMuffin with egg or scalloped potatoes or turkey yanked right off the carcass and dipped in gravy or See's chocolate.
