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I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?

I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.

Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.