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I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.

I didn't see my character, Core, as a cannibal but as somebody who is extremely passionate and who doesn't have any conscience. She takes her passion to its complete extreme.