I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.

My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

I didn't read about it for school. It was just for myself. I was interested in cults in general but Jonestown was the most interesting of all the cults I studied.

I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.

I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect.

Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.

I'm not trying to be coy, but I think everyone notices these things like skin color but some people are more aware that they are noticing them than others, maybe. If that makes sense.

I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.

I don't like stories that are too neat and too resolved. I think resolutions can be deadening for the reader.

I think cults never stop being interesting and I'm intrigued by how we all do a tiny bit of submitting to a larger group - and how they can sneak up on you.

He was a wise man who invented God.

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

My dream was to fall in love and be a mom. I never thought too much past those two things.

A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

There's no such thing as a bad carbohydrate.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong in passion is, though not so gross.

Fall Out Boy never pretended that we were anything but pop-rock.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"

I'll speak for the man, or against him, whichever will do him the most good.