One of the questions I get from readers regularly is about whether my novels are autobiographical. I'm guessing this happens to me so much because I wrote my first four novels in first person. Novels written this way tend to feel a bit like memoirs, so it's only natural that readers would wonder about how much of this fiction is fact. Whenever I'm asked this, my first thought is to squint my eyes like DiNiro and say, "Little bit." I'm awful at impersonations, though, so I don
My novel The Journey Home is both a love story and a rumination on the nature and meaning of home, a subject that means a great deal to me. It is also a novel about food. This happened organically because I have come so strongly to equate home with food. My parents were both excellent cooks and our house was the place where people came to eat. There seems to be a meal involved in every happy memory I have of growing up. I invented all the dishes and food scenes in the novel,
The first writer whose work truly resonated with me was Ray Bradbury. I’ll never forget picking up a copy of his story collection, I Sing the Body Electric before going on a six-hour car trip with my parents when I was twelve or thirteen. I have no recollection of that car trip because Bradbury had completely transported me. Right then, I became smitten with fantastic fiction. This affection followed me into my professional life, where my first real gig in the publishing busi
