You can't run from your roots.

I've always been a big reader.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

There’s nothing to do. You’ve been in the business long enough to understand grief. That’s the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don’t want to, you don’t want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death’s taught you that much at least.

Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you’ve only just opened your eyes.

While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas.

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink – this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He’d survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they’d just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.

These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer – all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.

Damn straight I’m lucky, I thought. I’m a Red Sox fan.

He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn’t come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor...