I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

I love the thriller genre generally. I like murder mysteries and those kinds of adventure stories.

I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.

My relationship was always abusive, so I chose to not socialise much. People who knew me knew that what pain I was going through.

Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people - if you're not those things, you probably don't choose this adventure - and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends.

So many of my friends are actors, and so many of them are great, and they're losing jobs to people who have never been in plays before; I understand that sometimes I'm part of the problem. But I'm trying to figure out how to balance it.