On growing up with an autistic brother:

“I was, as I say, writing from a very early age, and I think one of my reactions to the extremity of my childhood with this person in my life — who was clearly deranged and very unhappy to be on the planet — was that I made fun of my family in stories. From the very, very first, I understood that these people were worthy of fictional depiction. It was my way of grounding myself. It came to me very early on as an aid in exploring my relations with the world.”

On writing:

“The way I write books is not like other people I’ve known, who can have a very preformatted idea and a blueprint in their head. I really don’t proceed like that. I just kind of accrete the book, and I don’t really start out with a clear sense of where I’m going.”

“I think that learning another language is one of those things that allows you to develop a bit of perspective on your mother tongue and to step away from it a bit.”

On voice:

“I wrote the first draft of the book in the second person, and the second person was extremely useful because it can get at the strangeness of the person inhabiting it…What then became clear to me was that, at least for this book, the second person would prove to be too fatiguing to the reader, and also for the writer. [Laughter] So, having written a couple of hundred pages in the second person, which allowed me to inhabit this skewed perceptual landscape more efficiently and more freshly, I think, I then recast it in the first person while trying to retain that oddness, that peculiarity of the point of view.”

On being a writer:

“Well, I came from a book-worshipping family, a bibliophilic family. My dad was a book binder and a paper maker and a rare book collector. My mom was a novelist manqué who was basically masquerading as a piano teacher. I grew up in a house that just adored books.”

Read the interview here.