"I’m not really an autobiographical writer, though I use stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself I get very confused. … You need to write about yourself in terms of how you feel and in terms of what you’ve seen, but when you put it into another character, you free yourself from having to be accurate and truthful. You can make a different kind of truth. Whereas if you write about yourself, there is an actual truth that you’re trying to get to that you can never get to. I think that people who write memoirs must constantly be fearing that they’re not saying the truth about what happened, but with a novel, whatever you say is true and I think is more true than memoir. You’re still putting your thoughts and beliefs about the world into the character but the facts don’t all have to line up."