Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available.

My story follows a very classic tragic paradigm in which you learn things too late for them to be of any use, and by keeping silent about the thing that you're terrified of, you bring it about - and even worse.

Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.

Comedy has traditionally been about fear of embarrassment.