Interview excerpt from The Paris Review:
The conventional idea is that novels should be driven by the writer’s own experience. You delve into your own past in order to write your fiction. Writers who are like that, well, of course they’re driven. When they leave the office at five o’clock in the evening, they take their subject matter with them. When they talk to their spouse, when they walk the dog, their subject matter is still sitting on their shoulder because they are their own subject matter. I can’t raid my past for raw material because my past is so dull, so I have to make it all up, I have to start from scratch, inventing alternate landscapes to fill with invented people and invented narratives.
Read the full here.
Writing the Marrow 