“Don’t Stop is a novel about a woman with an utterly divided life, who tells herself that part of it is real and important (the part with her kind husband and good job) and the other, which encompasses an increasingly dark sexual affair, is make-believe.”
“…I’m a novelist who wants to be a musician. This is obvious from all my books but this one in particular.”
“‘You’re about to get hit by a hurricane.’ That’s the best advice I got about what it’s like when a baby makes landfall in your life. The First 649 Days begins there. It ends five years later, with the 649 days I spent with my son during the pandemic. In between, it tries to capture that everyday struggle we all confront: How do we become what life makes of us? “
“I do most of my writing in coffee shops, so my playlists are often selected by baristas.”
“The music herein may take you a place you may not want to go: to a graveside perhaps, or a deathbed, or simply to a wasted day. It may remind you what the Navajo believe: that if a sunrise finds you still asleep, God will simply assume you are dead.”
“…I wanted this list to capture something else — something deliberately accessible. Something glossy. Something you’d hear leaking from a car window at night. Something catchy enough to carry a body.”
“I read that Daniel Day-Lewis would listen to Eminem’s ‘The Way I Am’ every day on the set of Gangs of New York to get amped up for his role as Bill the Butcher, which I find almost unbearably cute in a boomer dad kind of way.”
“These songs were routes to the elemental, helping me get down to different scales of existence and see through the lens of a French Bulldog, the parasitic worms inside of her, as well as things like foam and glass and soil.”
“My new collection of short fiction, King the Wonder Dog: and Other Stories…is my love letter to the healing power of animals.”
“As a memoirist excavating my life, I needed a solid pier to anchor the boat. To write incisively about events that happened forty to fifty years ago, finding music to evoke those times was key.”