My mom was a big Elvis fan and a general pop culture buff, and so I grew up in a house filled with what were then called movie magazines,Before Elvis when Rhona Barrett wrote her column about the stars. And so it seeped in.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

As a reader I gravitate toward work that rests in the gray area, that doesn't come with easy answers.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

I think there's a fine line between being so obtuse that you lose the reader completely, which is the intention for some writers, though it isn't mine. I work hard at grounding the world as much as possible in the world we do recognize.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you know you have to hit the ground running.

I could have a lot of fun with Michael Jackson, I'm sure.

I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

To me, feminism in literature deals with the female characters being in some way central to the thematic concerns of the book, or that they are agents of change to some degree. In other words, the lens is focused deeply and intensely on the female characters and doesn't waver, which allows for a glimpse into the rich inner lives of the characters.

I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

I think it's still difficult to write about motherhood and anxiety, that talking about not wanting to be a mother or feeling ambivalent about motherhood makes people uneasy. The ambivalent mother is certainly much more interesting.

I've always gone with Kafka's model of establishing the world from the first line, as in Kafka's famous line from Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa woke up from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect (or beetle or cockroach, depending on the translation). I have to have that first line before I can go further.

You're thinking about the continuum of life as you load the washing machine or scoop out the litter box.blue-girl-larger Or maybe that's just me. That seems to be an endlessly challenging and interesting way to live.