When I really want to be comforted myself, what I look for is a story about how somebody could survive something really difficult.

I'm always writing from some difficult place and seeing how the character survives... or doesn't.

My favorite uncle died when I was eleven, and that was two months after 9/11, so that was a particularly difficult time with my family.

I was really beating myself up about performances and how I looked and this and that.

'History Is All You Left Me' is about the loss of your first love and how you move on beyond that and if you can.

Death is the one - the one thing we don't have many answers for. We understand how people die, but we don't know what comes next, and that's something that's always fascinated and disturbed me and frustrated me.