Amy Bloom

I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.

My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.

I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.

Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.

Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

I find the 1940s very compelling. It is a very excitable period in the U.S. when, whether out of necessity or not, everybody was reinventing themselves.

I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

I am interested in struggle - between our hearts and our head, between principle and desire - and one of those struggles is with mortality; and no one at all is immune to it, which makes it even more interesting to me. Some people fall in love, some don't. Some sky dive, some don't. Everyone who lives, ages.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.