On games:

“I guess I’ve always been into games as a kind of idea of a world within a world, or a sort of pocket universe, where things are played out that both seem more controlled and as a way to step outside of life. The game board becomes a kind of version of life. ”

On reading:

“I read a lot of Graham Greene when I was a teenager. I think it formed some sort of deep pattern for me of what a novel should feel like. The kinds of sentences and paragraphs and the proportion, the way he does narrative and also his tendency to use the pathetic fallacy everywhere to make landscapes or environments mirror the character’s emotional situation. He was like some sort of baseline condition for my own idea about what the novel was.”

“One of the things that I guess I’ve thought about lately — I’m getting older, we’re all sliding down the same terrible slope. I’ve been reading and thinking about a lot of really compelling narratives of women acknowledging the change in their lives as allure that’s been stolen from them. There are so many brave, brilliant, courageous, intense accounts of the somatic life of the woman’s body and the woman’s beauty suffering change. I think in a weird way, men don’t get to… It’s sort of been disqualified because we’re all so uncomfortable with masculinity right now.”

On process:

“For me, often the best way to write about something that intimidates me is to write about a character who’s equally buffaloed or helpless in the face of it.”

“There’s a kind of design for a book that I like very much that’s counterintuitive. It’s where the most catastrophic possible thing occurs in the exact center of a story. The book divides into prelude and aftermath. It’s not a very typical structure for a novel, but a couple of my favorite books organize themselves that way.”

“I really, really wanted it to feel like it wasn’t a pile of arrows pointing outside of its own system but that they all pointed inward.”

“I’ve always bragged of not outlining books, but — I’m almost embarrassed to say it — I kind of outlined this one.

I really surprised myself with how interested I got in what that did. Because of course it was nevertheless the case that every day was an improvisational exercise. The map is not the territory, and what makes a book really alive — and the reason I used to brag about not outlining — is the sensation of having to be like a character actor, feeling your way into every situation that the book presents.

Well, it turned out that writing an outline didn’t prohibit that, didn’t thwart that experience. It changed it slightly. Maybe it even amplified it in some ways, because I was triangulating against this weird… it’s like I made the poster first and then I made the movie or something. I’d be glancing up at the poster and be like, Oh yeah. I can’t wait to see that movie. It didn’t help me, but it sort of inspired me.”

Read the complete interview.