I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

I am oftentimes the ear for some people that I know and love. Which I like being. I don't know if I'd like being a marriage counselor, though, because that's too deep for me.

My parents' long and happy marriage was a great ideal to live up to, but a tough one.

Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.

What I've found in doing research is that men want a relationship that feels fun. In other words, they want a relationship that has qualities or elements of their same-sex relationships - just like women do, too.