Fiction readers expect more of characters than they do of people in real life. In life you can have a person who does inexplicable self-destructive or transgressive shit, and friends and colleagues just shake their heads and say, “Oh, that’s…
Like many writers, I’m quite introverted. I like quiet. I like a room of my own, a state of low stimulus equilibrium. I’m a listener more than a talker; a watcher more than a doer; risk averse, rather than a…
I decided to write a historical novel because I wanted to get completely out of my day-to-day life and contemporary everything—terrorism, the failure of capitalism, modern marriage, childhood and adolescence, politics, racism, climate change, you name it. Did I have…