If there's one theme in all my work, it's about authenticity and self-expression. It's the idea that some things are, in some real sense, really you - or express what you and others aren't.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Maybe a theme that touches all of my work is people reinventing themselves.
What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.
Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric - it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation.
I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge.
A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.
Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.
There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
I don't consciously go out looking for themes. They attach themselves to me.
A theme in a lot of my books - and in my own life - is making choices that you feel you should make, or what society wants you to make, as opposed to what is truly right for you.
The theme for me is love and the lack of it. We all want that and we don't know how to get it, and everything we do is some kind of attempt to capture it for ourselves.