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As a child who loved to read, I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.