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I've seen 'Fried Green Tomatoes' too many times. I love life stories told in flashback.

I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

The Kitchen, which my wife and I opened with our friend and amazing chef Hugo Matheson, was quickly recognized as the pioneer in 'green' restaurants across the country.

Wherever a writer grew up, they're obviously influenced by that area, and I'm sure their characters are pulled from those experiences.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.