To Conform Is To Lose Your Soul

I Come From A Very Illustrious Line Of Divorces. We Love To Get Divorced In My Family. My Mother And Father Have Been Married Four Times Each - Eight Ceremonies With The Best Of Intentions.

If Someone Were Plucked From The Group And Given Those Responsibilities, They Might Find Themselves Growing More Aloof, Just By Virtue Of That Promotion. Suddenly The Group Culture Excludes You. I Saw This In My Own Working Life, And I Don't Think It's A Coincidence - I Sensed A Kind Of Loneliness In Middle Managers Especially.

I Always Knew From The Beginning That This Was The Only Way To Write Then We Came To The End - That It Had To Be In First - Person Plural If It Was Going To Illustrate How The Individual Becomes Part Of The Collective. I Had No Interest In Writing The Book In A More Conventional Voice. It Goes Back To That Fascination I Had With Telling A Story In Multiple Ways. It Was The Only Choice I Gave Myself, Really - I Said "this Is It, Pal. If You Can't Tell A Story This Way, You're Going To Have To Abandon The Book. Write It This Way Or Give Up."

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.

I Can't Trace Thematic Similarities Between Then We Came To The End And The Unnamed To A Life Event; I Think It's More Just A Natural Progression As A Writer. Everything Changes In The Second Book - Tonally, Character-wise, Situationally - And On Top Of That, I Think I Wanted A Challenge. I Wanted To See If I Could Do It.