Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.
I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven't lived in a small town since.
Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.
In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.
Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.
I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'
It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.
We're all looking for an authentic way to be engaged in the community, engaged in politics, engaged in national discussion - and so, we're clunky. We're all clunky. But it's better than not doing it.
'Casebook' is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.
We have all these cultural assumptions about love. People get hurt, and we say, 'Oh, it's no one's fault.'
I didn't know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.
I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn't feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.
I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn't have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods - everything came from bins.
I do have food in my books. Different people eat different ways.
My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.
Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.
