When did you start writing?
When I was very small. I was given a typewriter for my sixth birthday. I had already announced I wanted to be a writer. Wherever it came from, the impulse came early.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up around and about. I was born in the U.S. and made a circle-I lived in Canada until I was four, Australia until I was nine and a half, Canada again until I was thirteen; then I came back to the States for high school and college, then went to graduate school in England where I ended up staying for seven years with a nine month break in the middle. I've been back in the US for six years.
Home is people, not places, for me. [There's] some strange way in which the south of France is home as a physical place. It's where my father's family is from and a place I've been back to every year, all my life. It's not home in any other way, but it has the most consistency. It's familiar.
What are your most memorable moments from Yale?
I was a young adult in touch with my dark side. I was often depressed. I made wonderful friends who are still my best friends today, and had terrific professors; it was an incredibly full time.
What elements of writing are most important to your own novel? Form, character?
I'm interested in structure, and particularly in the sentence-its elasticity, its flexibility. There is a need for the sentence to reflect the complexity of human thought, the complexity of experience. Above all, I'm interested in people. Character is what I get most excited about as a reader. Human truth, that's what interests me most. Everything else follows.
What are your most memorable moments from Cambridge?
Life after college is never like college. One of the hard things about Cambridge was that Yale was very intense, incredibly alive, challenged. Cambridge was much more difficult, more of a culture clash than I thought it would be. I feel as though when you ask me about Yale, there's so much: I participated in theater, wrote fiction, was involved in women's center stuff. Cambridge was a much quieter time. It rained a lot.
What are your feelings towards your characters? Are there any you have a particular dislike for?
Peter Carey told me that in his work he had characters he sometimes didn't like, that he sometimes loathed. I've sort of loved my characters. I don't necessarily like them, but I love them. Characters are like family; you don't ask that question. Once you get to know someone, it doesn't matter whether or not they're nice. One of the novellas in my forthcoming book is narrated by a dislikable individual, but would I say I disliked the character? No. But who knows what monsters may come.
How do you decide on a topic or subject matter for each novel?
There are several things I think about. It becomes a matter of choosing one over others; it has some greater urgency. Something draws you to it more. At the same time, the life something takes on after even a year, it bears no resemblance to the germ, to the idea it was. It takes on its own life.
What is your typical novel-writing process? Do you follow a set process each time you write?
The process is different every time. You would think that writing a novel teaches you to write a novel, but each time it's new. I write by hand, then put it on the computer and revise. There's process in a practical sense. Sometimes it's from beginning to end, other times it's in bits. Nabokov used to write on file cards, and other people cut out passages and arrange them on the floor. The trajectory of my writing process is fairly, if not linear, certainly progressive.
How do you overcome writer's block?
I once read this wonderful article-someone signed up for a course on overcoming writer's block at a community college. [He] went to the class. The instructor handed out pens and pieces of paper [and] said, "I'm leaving the room and shutting the door. You can't leave until you've written 10 pages." That was it; that was the course. There's a certain truth to that. You can't wait for a muse to take you. Through the practice of writing you get better, it becomes less of a big deal. It's like exercise. If you go to the gym only once every two years, it's extremely painful when you do go.
Are you working on a new novel?
I've started something. We'll see what happens. In the beginning, it's an arbitrary decision. Only by force does it begin to seem living and organic. My new novel is set in New York. That would be the first thing I've ever written set in this country.
What authors have been most influential in your own writing? Who are your favorite authors?
Writers are so different; it's impossible to know how directly they influence one. Different people would see different influences from different places.
I have eclectic reading tastes. Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" is a novel that I care a lot about, and it's interesting to see how it has been a major influence for many very different writers whose work I really love, such as Albert Camus and Thomas Bernhard. I also love Henry James, Virginia Woolf. There's also an eclectic list of living writers, among them Alice Munro and the Australian Peter Carey-he is a writer whose work is endlessly innovative, incredibly satisfying.
When I read, I really don't want the same book over and over again. I want to feel that people are taking risks.
Who are some of the most interesting people you have met?
I've interviewed various writers, all of whom have been interesting to me in some way or other. Jeannette Winterson is so powerfully herself. She's the author, most famously, of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit." It's an autobiographical book about growing up in an evangelist Christian family. She has the character of an evangelical about literature rather than religion. She's a strong figure. I've also had the good fortune to meet, in less formal ways, a bunch of interesting people-at the dinner table, etc.
When I worked as a journalist for The Guardian in the early '90s, I interviewed people who were fascinating to me, not famous necessarily. One woman worked in international conflict resolution and she was blind. She taught at Harvard, but had returned on a trip to Britain because of a strange irony that in America you have to be a citizen to get a guide dog, and in Britain you have to be a resident.
Finally, she bullied the British into giving her a dog. She's an international lawyer. She wanted to take her guide dog on the plane with her and British Airways said no, to which she replied, "I drafted the FAA regulations and I know I can." She was working in Kosovo trying to avert the crisis-there was fear even then that the war would spread. Her work was ahead of the game.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Persistence is every bit as important as talent. You can be a brilliant writer, but if you don't stick with it, you might not succeed. You have to steel yourself for rejections and keep going. Why, you have to love it. In a general way, what does the much-used phrase "finding your voice" really mean? I think now what it means is having the confidence to write what you can in its most authentic way without worrying about whether it's fashionable, without any external considerations.
There's a line between being rightly persevering and being insane. Schopenhauer's "World as Will and Representation" (1818) wasn't even reviewed. It didn't receive any attention. Nothing. His confidence was such that he thought, "I've written a great book and people will know." He was vindicated after the publication of his final book in 1851. Thirty years he spent believing in his own greatness, when no one else did.
You have to have some of that faith in yourself, and yet temper it with a humility and openness to getting better and changing.