Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It’s a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike – I will say it – the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus.

What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it’s not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled – late one night, in a dark mood – PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret.

It wasn’t her problem to solve; it was Kevin’s. Let God fix him. After repeating the words for months, she finally understood what they meant. Let go and let God.

That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can’t make the sacrifice, or don’t want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.