Writing is so hard. It’s terrifying. And yet, when it goes well, it’s magical – better than any drug. You write for that fleeting moment when you get… - Danzy Senna

With my first novel, when I was having such a hard time letting it go, I remember my brother saying to me, “It’s just a record of your creative mindset in a particular moment. You can’t drag it into the next moment. Let it be a record.” That was very helpful to me in terms of letting go – understanding there is no perfect version of the novel, there is only a time and place you wrote it as well as you could, reflecting your preoccupations, and then you move on.

Novels are more like a marriage, stories more like affairs. A novel is something you live with for years and the characters in it become your second world, your second life. You think about them when you are not with them. You consider breaking up with them. You love them, you hate them. You fear them and avoid them and then run toward them and have a hard time extricating yourself from them. It’s such a whole body and mind experience that when it’s over and you are finally done, you experience real grief. Relief too, but also grief and a kind of identity crisis. You don’t know who you are without these characters to return to and wrestle with.

My mother had this book lying around our house in the 1980s called “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” I remember looking through it as a kid and understanding that Jewish people had their own inside jokes, and this fact alone somehow made me feel that Jewish people were their own club, a tribe, with an inside and an outside.