I learned a lot of details about 1920s clothes, cars, kitchen appliances, and food. I had a character eating peanut butter in one scene until I learned that peanut butter wasn't commercially packaged and sold until 1924.

The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.

This life is mine because of good luck. And because I reached out and took it.

I am supposed to be where I go.

I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.

One way to remain unfinished is to stop. the other is to go on.

It's like swimming, underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes. hold my breath, and keep kicking.

You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back

I don't think I've ever tried on a corset, though a certain bridesmaid's dress did require a torturous bustier that will stay forever burned in my sensory memory.

This is how it is now. This is my life.

I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars.

Yes, Louise Brooks was beautiful and intelligent, and she could be very funny, but obviously there was a deep insecurity there, a real destructive rage and immaturity.

Someone needs to give the Pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.

While I was writing the book, I went to see Louise Brooks's most famous film, Pandora's Box, at the Tivoli in Kansas City, and it was a lovely experience. You can watch old silent films on DVD or even on YouTube, but it was a different feeling watching her up on the big screen, seeing the film the way people saw it all those years ago.