My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.
If you’re ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.
I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.
I've certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.
I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.
Mostly I enjoy the restaurants (my husband is a chef), though I wish we had a wider diversity of ethnic food.
In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.
In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!
If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.
Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.
Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.
I like visiting peoples homes on Saint Josephs Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public - I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.
Sometimes we gotta be brave even when we're scared. We gotta not let being scared keep us from thinkin' straight. That's all brave is, boy, when you come right down to it, not lettin' the fear get you so turned around you start doin' stupid things, instead of what you know you ought to do.
And I can't think of a reason I'd ever use a pseudonym, as I wouldn't want to publish something that I didn't like enough to put my name on it.
My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.
Celebrities, even insignificant ones like me, are created to be abused by the Great Unwashed.
My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.
New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.
You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.
Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.
