In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault.
It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.
In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.
I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.
It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.
I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.
Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.
When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.
There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.
Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.
I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.
I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country.
When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.
There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.
