Often we pick up a book to escape. While the pages turn, the real world ceases to exist. But for Nina Sankovitch, books led her back to reality. After a devastating loss, Nina read a book a day for an entire year. Each story helped her navigate, and ultimately survive, her grief. Nina’s debut memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, will make you want to drop everything and read—not to run away from life, but to find a new way back in. We spoke to Nina about growing up with books, what prompted her to write, and her latest quest to celebrate the great art of letter writing.

This is an excerpt from an interview that Maria Gagliano and I conducted for  issue 10 of Slice magazine. To read the full interview, you can purchase the magazine here.

We’re amazed that you were able to read a book a day for an entire year. Readers will have to pick up Tolstoy and the Purple Chair to find out how you really did it, but can you reveal one or two brief secrets about how you were able to complete the 365 Project while balancing family and other obligations?

I cut out anything that really wasn’t that vital, like a clean house. It wasn’t dirty, but it was dusty. And I wasn’t working. I don’t see how I could have done it with a full-time job. It would have been impossible. What I did was I made it my job. It was what I did during the day. This is what I did. I read, and I wrote about what I read.

We love that line of yours: “Great good comes from reading great books.” Can you tell us about one of your most memorable instances of great good coming from reading a great book?

What was so surprising to me that I learned through reading—and it shouldn’t have been surprising—was that I’m not at all alone. I discovered that around the world there are people who have felt terrible loss and struggled to figure out how to keep going.

But then another surprise was that I would just start talking to someone. A neighbor with whom I had never experienced more than a light, “How are you?” would ask, “What are you reading?” Then we would move on to talk about all kinds of things, really personal things, because when you are talking about books, all of a sudden you can talk about anything.

Is there one book in particular that you keep rereading over the years, just out of love for the story or writing?

I try to always look for a new book, but there are a couple I reread every year. At Christmas I read A Christmas Carol. There’s a novel by Nadine Gordimer called Burger’s Daughter, which I first read when I was eighteen. I reread it in my twenties, my thirties, and now in my forties. It’s a great book that has spoken to me at all these different stages. Then Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone—if I went to a desert island, that’s the book I’d take.

Have your children picked up the same love for books that you shared with your family growing up? What do they enjoy reading most?

They pretty much did. They’re kind of all over the board. One son likes Philip Roth and essays by George Plimpton. He loves Joan Didion. He has pretty sophisticated taste. Then my sixteen-year-old likes Michael Lewis. My thirteen-year-old loves science fiction. My ten-year-old is rereading all of the Harry Potter books. They don’t have the same taste. I can’t say to one, “Now that you’re old enough, your brother read all the Hardy Boys, so you should read them too.” It’s interesting how their tastes are varied.

It is so great that they are all reading.

Yes, and there are times when they would want to stop. One of my sons once said, “I don’t want to read at night.” But he was excited when I started to read at night to him again, and I liked it. We were reading great books. Then, he said, “I’m okay on my own again.” And I thought, oh no!

So moving on to your next project, which celebrates the great tradition of letter writing. Can you tell us a little about why you chose letters?

I’ve always liked reading other people’s letters. I also like reading collected letters from different writers. I’m not really interested in celebrity letters. I always enjoy reading what someone like Edith Wharton wrote about. It was interesting how I could see so much Edith Wharton in her letters.

Has your project prompted you to write to people you might not have written to before?

It definitely has, and it has sparked people to write to me. Of course, when they write to me, I think, well, I’m not sending an email back! That has been really nice. I have a shoebox full of letters that I’ve received over the last six months. It’s amazing.

Nina Sankovitch photo credit (on homepage): Douglas Healey.

Photo by John Dugdale

Many of us remember crawling into bed, blankets tucked in firmly, and looking up as someone’s hand slowly turned the pages of a picture book. In that magical moment our bedroom would transform, the images on those pages eclipsing the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Maurice Sendak captured the power of a child’s imagination, to transport them into the wild recesses of dreams, in his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. And so he was a natural fit for this issue of Slice. We had the opportunity to chat on the phone with Maurice, who lives in Connecticut, a week before his eighty-second birthday. He took us back to the wildest place he ever went to, the place that inspired the adventures of his mischievous character named Max. It was his childhood home, located in Brooklyn, the same borough as Slice’s headquarters. So it turns out that the wild can take root in your backyard, or if you don’t have one—as is the case for many city kids—in the nooks and crannies of your apartment.

This brief chat is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Maria Gagliano for Slice’s ninth issue, “Into the Wild.”

This is the Brooklyn magazine, right?

Yes. This is Celia Johnson and Maria Gagliano, from Slice.

Good, okay.

Maria is actually from Bensonhurst.

Oh my god. Well, she lived through it.

Our first question is actually about Brooklyn. You were born in Brooklyn, which is where we are based, and we were wondering what some of your favorite childhood memories are.

Let’s see if I have any. I guess there were my friends, the kids I knew. It was a good time for me. The trees were healthy and shady. I guess I say that because there was an article in the paper today about how all the trees in this poor little town, all the trees were blown away. It made me think of Brooklyn where all the trees were wonderful, so thick, heavy. I know there are trees elsewhere than Brooklyn, but I only knew the Brooklyn trees. And the stoop where everybody sat and chatted and talked and hollered, yelled and threatened. Skating with my brother.

These are ordinary childhood memories, nothing special. There were mysteries that we hid from our parents, but that’s what all children do. We only told them a little bit about life. We didn’t want them to get nervous. So we kept things from them. But that’s not Brooklyn, that’s just childhood. All I can really tell you is, I had a good time.

One of the best parts of childhood is the little things.

Yes. Blanket in the backyard. Having a girlfriend and not knowing what that meant. Things like that. Giving a girl a ring. It meant something. But she didn’t know what it meant any more than I. But I remember, I gave a girl my 1935 World’s Fair ring, and immediately I regretted it. But I knew I shouldn’t ask for it back. I didn’t marry her. I never saw her afterwards. I didn’t leave Brooklyn, but if you moved as often as we did, even if you lived only eight blocks away from someone, you never saw those people again.

So you never got that ring back?

No. She still has it wherever she is, god bless her. I hope she’s alright. I hope she didn’t sell it on eBay.

We’re with you there. Our theme for this issue is “Into the Wild,” so we immediately thought of you. Your writing and your outlook perfectly fit into the theme. We were wondering, what is the wildest place you ever visited?

The wildest place? You’d probably have to go back to Brooklyn. Things happen in childhood that are so flabbergasting. They don’t happen again because we control ourselves when we grow up. We try to be respectable people. But there’s nothing respectable about childhood, nor should there be.

So I would say the wildest place was Brooklyn. And that’s when the relatives were still alive. People who came from the old country during the war; it was a terrible time. And my uncles and aunts came from Europe. It seems I had something against all of them, because they always came to our house to eat, and I was not a generous fellow. I didn’t like the eating at our house. They became the wild things. The wild things looked just like them. That’s a hard thing to say, but they’re all gone.

I remember my brother and I and my sister would go into another room when they came to talk about whether we had to sit with them, because they were so hungry waiting for my mother to cook dinner. They might easily have taken a bite out of us. We used to hide together. I loved my brother, and I loved my sister. They’re both gone, and I miss them very, very much. I did not love my relatives, but they did make a good book.

They definitely did. What was one of your standard meals at home with the relatives?

Anything that was in the Jewish cookbook. It was a lot of chicken-y type meals, and soup-y meals, and also my mother was not a great cook.

Oh, no?

No. I remember everybody lived together in a four-family house. We were on the top floor. Across the hall from us was an Italian family. I used to sneak from our house—or apartment, rather—to the Italian part where my friend and her brothers and her sisters and I used to sit at their table.

Oh, Italian cooking was so splendid and wonderful. But once my mother found out I was sneaking off to their house, then I was in a lot of trouble. But the Italians ate and drank and kissed and hugged. They were bad…they were a different type of people.

Joshua Ferris’s novels, The Unnamed and Then We Came to an End share something in common: they focus on people who are pushed to an extreme.  In different scenarios, Ferris considers just what it means to explore the terrifying places that lie beyond personal limitations.  One of Ferris’s most outstanding gifts is his ability to create something extraordinary out of what at first glance seems like routine existence.  When we chatted with Ferris, he offered insight into this creative process and then took us back to his childhood and to the worlds of make-believe that helped shape his own views on writing. (This is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Maria Gagliano for issue 8 of Slice. For the full interview, you can purchase a copy of the magazine here.)

What is your writing process? Do you work from detailed outlines or let the story unfold as you write?

Always unfold.

Where is your favorite place to write?

My house upstate. It’s solitary and quiet and beautiful, especially this time of year, when fall is giving way to winter.

As a child, did you build worlds of make-believe? Or was there a favorite imaginative game that you used to play?

I used to pretend I knew how to read long before I did. I remember pretending to be reading a James Michener novel at around five, while two friends of mine, who could read a little, questioned the swiftness with which I was turning pages. I don’t know if that’s an imaginative game so much as a fraudulent one. I still haven’t read any James Michener.

What is your favorite make-believe world?

Charles Kinbote’s.

What in particular do you love about Kinbote’s world?

The humor. A great partisan of table tennis, Kinbote has two ping-pong tables in his basement. When asked by a colleague why, he replies, “Why not?” He also thinks he’s a deposed king living in exile in New England. What’s not to love?

Are there any people (authors or otherwise) who have been role models for you as a writer?

Sure. But they are too numerous to delineate, and they no longer menace my workday.

What was your favorite book growing up? Is there one in particular that really got you into reading and writing?

The Richard Scarry books were pretty important, as was Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig. Later it was Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, and Beverly Cleary. At thirteen it became Dostoevsky and Nabokov.

Rae Gouirand lives in Davis, California, leads private workshops in poetry and creative nonfiction throughout the Central Valley, and blogs about teaching and writing life at allonehum.wordpress.com. Her first collection of poems, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize for Poetry and is currently a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award and the California Book Award. You can get your hands on a copy from Amazon or your local independent bookseller, or at www.belldaybooks.com.

Would you describe your writing space?

My writing space is really pretty squarely between my ears. I do a lot of my thinking on long walks with my iPod, and on long drives with my iPod. (I find living in California sort of refreshes one’s sense of available internal space pretty much endlessly.)

I do a lot of my typing wherever other people are also working. Often in places that sell coffee, which I don’t really drink. The writing is portable. It’s the headphones that are essential. I don’t enjoy sitting on my couch for long periods of time, but other people’s couches are usually fine. My house is more of a treehouse where I sleep and cook with sweeties and do yoga, though I do journal primarily at home. I find Ikea a surprisingly good place to work, especially on weekdays. I encourage anyone who finds themselves snickering at the idea to give it a whirl.

Do you have any quirky writing habits?

Before I started writing, I was a musician. Songs were my first literature. When I’m writing my way into first drafts, I find a song I need to listen to over and over and over, make a playlist that’s just it, and drown myself in it for a few hours. I do mean hours. And I’ve often got the volume turned up pretty high. It’s about entering this other space where the form and rhythm that the body recognizes get shifted to the foreground. Also, about erasing an everyday sense of how much we’re capable of passing through our mouths–singers know so much about instrumentation, and about how much space can be opened up within single words. After the first draft, no more tunes–just me reading the words over and over and over until I start to feel exactly what’s underneath them.

Who are your favorite writers of all time?

My students. I’ve been teaching for over a decade now, and have run an intensive, year-round nonfiction workshop in Davis and Sacramento for the last eight years–the projects and manuscripts that have been born in that community are truly my favorite things to read. Living drafts are truly miraculous things–they’re my absolute favorite animals. The authors who have most stretched my headspace for writing are probably Anne Carson, John D’Agata, Carole Maso, and Lidia Yuknavitch. Also my dear friend Brent Armendinger, who teaches at Pitzer and who has two incredible chapbooks out–his poetry is like a treasure map of all the wisdom that gets lost when we try to think with our brains. This year I’ve really fallen in love with Joanna Klink and Rilke.

Where do you tend to find inspiration for your poetry?

In prose. And queer things. The intense conversations with people I always seem to have at the center of my life.

What distracts you most when you sit down to write?

Nothing. Everything is part of the words as soon as I show up with my writing attention. Sometimes that can take a little while, but usually not too long.

Do you tend to write your poems in great gusts or is it a slow process?

I tend to feel out 6-12 poems at a time, in families. My new pieces always seem to want to talk to each other. I usually go have two writing seasons each year: a primary, super-intense, train-wreck-eyewitness-level one from January through the spring, then one that’s a longer, broader view-from-above from late summer through early December. Prose is no different. Right now I’m going nuts trying to find enough hours in the day to keep up with this group of about eight essays I’m drafting simultaneously. The whole last year of my life has been about prose–I couldn’t be happier or more scared to be opening up poetics on a whole new level. It’s probably the hardest writing I’ve ever done and I seriously can’t get enough.

Serial comma or no serial comma?

Oxford comma all the way.

Time Out (New York) described Justin Taylor‘s gift as “illuminating the connections between the mundane and the grotesque.” He accomplished just that in his short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, and his debut novel, The Gospel of Anarchy.  He also has a wicked sense of humor, demonstrated in the following interview.

What is one of your favorite memories of reading during childhood?

Visiting New York City with my mom the summer I turned ten. (We lived in South Florida.) One day she took me to The Mysterious Bookshop. I doubt she had any pre-existing knowledge of the place, so we probably just happened by it on our way somewhere else (this was in 1992, when it was still in Midtown). I had never seen a store like it before: narrow and dim and with books everywhere, and this tight spiral staircase that led upstairs to another book-filled room. It’s such a powerful image in my mind I almost suspect it of being a screen memory, but I know it really happened because I left there with my first “grown-up” book: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.

What experiences outside the literary have influenced your work?

I want to say “all experience influences my work” and leave it that, but I know that’s kind of a bum answer, so let me try something else. Place has a huge influence on my work: cities, neighborhoods, even individual buildings or homes. Sometimes this is self-evident in the final product and sometimes it’s not, but I think that people would be surprised to know how many of my stories began with the place it was set rather than the people I stuck there.

Do you have a daily writing routine?

No. I try to do some kind of writing-related work every day, but what that means on any given day is largely contingent on my mood and whatever else is happening in my life at the time. I also have a fairly inclusive definition of what counts as “writing-related work.” There’s writing new prose, there’s editing stuff you’ve written, but there’s also reading. Over the Christmas break I read a ton of poetry criticism and a biography of Coleridge. It wasn’t “for” any particular project, and I have no idea whether, how or when the information I consumed will appear in anything I write. I just had the strong desire to go absorb all that stuff, and so I did it. I place blind trust in the imperative urge–and I also call it work.

How do you overcome writer’s block?

You could probably guess this from my last answer: when I don’t have anything to write, I don’t write. Sometimes my reserves are just depleted and I don’t have anything to say. That means it’s time to do some creative reading, and go live a little. The keyboard will still be there when I get back.

Which writers inspire you?

Virginia Woolf, Marilynne Robinson, Don DeLillo, Dennis Cooper, Raymond Carver, Eva Talmadge, David Berman, G.K. Chesterton, Mark Doten, Saul Bellow. Plus, you know, Shakespeare and Dickens and the Bible and all that shit.

Would you describe your workspace?

For the past four and a half years I’ve worked at a desk in my bedroom in my Bushwick apartment. The first desk was a piece of shit I bought for forty dollars from a store below the JMZ and built myself. The current desk is metal with a wood top and came from a thrift store on the block. It’s on a windowless white wall opposite my bed. There are a few scraps of paper taped to the wall: a Denis Donoghue quote, a Barry Hannah quote, a postcard Amanda sent me when we first started dating, and a fortune cookie fortune that reads: “Go for the gold today! You’ll be the champion of whatever.” Right now the desk has on it: my laptop (a 15″ MacBook), a decent pair of computer speakers, a jam jar full of pens and an orange-handled scissors, lots of messily stacked papers, some curled up iPod cords, a copy of Countdown to Putsch’s Interventions in Hegemony, my other pair of glasses, and a souvenir statuette of the facade of the Sao Paolo Cathedral in Macau, which Amanda and I visited last summer. I bought it with the intention of staring at it every day until I wrote it into a story–and I did write it into a story, but now staring at it every day is just part of what I do. But by the time this gets posted Amanda and I will have moved to our new apartment in the South Slope, which has an office just big enough for us each to fit a desk in. I don’t know how we’ll set it up yet, but I’m planning to keep facing the wall.

The world is on the brink of apocalypse. What three books do you slip in your backpack before climbing into your bunker?

The Riverside Shakespeare, Kafka’s stories, and Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Though I should add that if I had the reasonable expectation of eventually emerging from the bunker, I’d switch the poetry out for a guide to edible plants or–. I actually stopped typing that last sentence, opened a new browser window, and googled the Boy Scout Handbook. Seems like it has a lot of what I’m looking for, plus campfire songs. So maybe that.

Julie Metz is a graphic designer, artist, and freelance writer whose essays have appeared in publications including Glamour and Hemispheres magazines, and the online story site mrbellersneighborhood.com. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughter and partner.  Her memoir, Perfection, is now available in paperback. 

You write about grief and lies with raw honesty in your memoir, Perfection. Have you been struck by the honesty of someone else’s writing? Or other forms of media?

A few recent memoirs that have really stayed with me are Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye. Like so many readers, I was blown away when I first read Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss. I don’t think I would have been able to write my book without these trailblazing women as guides. All these writers are poets and novelists and they bring an inspiring skill and sensibility to their non-fiction. In other media, the 2011 documentary film “Buck” offers an unvarnished view of one man’s journey to overcome his abusive childhood. The skillful editing allows the viewer to experience raw emotions without sentimentality.

You are a writer, a graphic designer, and an artist. Do you find that your visual work informs your writing (or the reverse, perhaps)?

The two paths in my creative life often overlap and feed each other in surprising ways. Whether it’s drawing, designing, or writing—it’s all about making choices to tell a story or create an emotional response for an audience. All the senses are so interconnected. Ideas come to me while taking a walk in my neighborhood, in a museum looking at art, or listening to music.

Were you surprised by any revelations that developed through the act of writing your book?

Every writing day was a surprise. What I couldn’t have imagined at the beginning was the process of self-discovery in writing about past experiences. As the story itself unfolded in unplanned ways, there were times when I felt like a detective uncovering the mystery of my marriage. And I think that when you open yourself to such experiences, whatever the art form, it draws people and insight to you…a surprising kind of research.

Was it easy to select a title?

That came easily. The title Perfection is related to a book my husband was writing at the time of his death—a food travelogue about Umami, the so-called fifth taste, sometimes translated from the Japanese as “the moment of perfection.” So my memoir was about trying to understand a man who kept searching for perfection and in the process was self-destructive.

Would you describe your writing space? 

I write at a small desk in our living room. During the day I am usually the only person in the room, so it feels spacious and airy. There is a small jungle of plants in the windows facing the street and I love looking at them when I am searching for a word. Sometimes my materials spread out and about. In my fantasy life, I’d have a large study with large tables and wall space to post lists and ideas and images that inspire me. But I wonder what would happen if this fantasy became reality. I might be too intimidated to write! So for now I am good with my small desk. I have surrounded myself with writing charms: a small figure of Ganesh (remover of obstacles!); colorful stones I have collected from places I love; an antique inkstand and lightbulb; inspiring photos, shells and pieces of coral, a paper origami cat my daughter made for me when she was young; inspiring books of the moment; The Elements of Style, notebooks in progress, a small sculpture given to me by a friend. It’s quite a clutter actually, but all these objects give me comfort.

Above my desk I have hung a landscape painting by artist Christie Sheele, an abstract landscape with electric poles. It’s like a window I can look through when I need a breath of air.

Photos courtesy of Julie Metz

You’ve said that your most challenging job is being a mother (as the mother of a one-year-old girl, I’d have to agree with you!). What is your favorite book that you’ve shared with your daughter?

I struggle to name a single favorite. We loved picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse when she was little. We read all the Little Bear series, everything by Rosemary Wells, fairy tales of every sort, especially collections illustrated by the amazing Jane Ray. I loved reading her Alice in Wonderland. One of my personal favorites is a book I loved as a child, Jean Stafford’s Elephi, The Cat with the High IQ—an “only in New York story” published in the 1960s—still a great read! I read her the first of A Series of Unfortunate Events (after that she read the rest of the series on her own) as well as the first Harry Potter, before we moved on to the amazing Jim Dale audio series, excellent for long car trips. She always wanted me to read to her “with voices,” so I had to really think about portraying characters without any experience as an actor. The effort of those many evenings together has been a big help to me as an author. When I plan public readings, I still think about reading aloud in a way that would satisfy a discriminating five year-old. These days I am trying to get my now 15-year old daughter enthused about Jane Austen. You can never be lonely with one of her novels.

What are you working on now?

I can’t say too much about it now…but it is a memoir about my family history.

In 2007, Jennifer Mascia wrote a Modern Love column about her father’s criminal past and her mother’s lifelong attempt to keep it a secret. The column, entitled “Never Tell Our Business to Strangers,” was expanded to a book (published in February 2010).

Would you describe your memoir in just six words?

Gangster father; lying, loving mother; pasta.

Your book reveals the shocking truth of your father’s crimes. Did you find the process of writing this story unsettling or comforting? Or both?

When my parents died, I realized our past was all I had left of them. Unfortunately most of this past was scattered with half-truths, and in order to fully grieve and close the door on my childhood, I had to flush out all the lies. It also had to do with my sanity: I believed what my mother told me about my dad – that he was just a carpet cleaner, that his arrests were cases of mistaken identity – but that didn’t jibe with my new career as a journalist, a profession where dishonesty is taboo (just ask Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass). In order to reconcile my past with my present, I had to lay it all out on the table, and it was cathartic.

What inspired you to write this story down, first for the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, and then in book form?

I was tired of being the only person to remember my childhood and the people I lived it with. I couldn’t live with the fact that I’d be the only one to remember them, because even though there was bad, there was an awful lot of good. So one night I was reading a backlog of Modern Love columns, and seeing these people open themselves in print encouraged me to do the same.

Were you surprised by any elements of the book publishing process?

I was surprised that, unless you’re a celebrity, the phrase “book tour” is obsolete. Aside from a few readings, most of what I did to promote the book consisted of radio interviews set up by an outside publicist I hired. You really have to drive your own publicity, especially when you work in media, because chances are you have more contacts than your publishing company does. Also, you pay for everything – book parties, publicity, mailings. And taxes on book advances. Become intimately acquainted with TurboTax and keep track of all your write-offs, because they really help.

Would you describe your writing space? 

My writing space is either my terminal at the Times or my desktop at home – anything but a laptop. I am a desktop person. It’s kind of like, wherever there’s a desktop on a desk where I can kick up my legs, that’s my HQ.

You are primarily a nonfiction writer, but have you considered fiction?

I have such respect for writers who can conjure worlds from whole cloth. I gravitated toward journalism because, I believe, my mind is not as richly imaginative as the real life scenarios I encounter. I wish it wasn’t so, I wish I could do both, but truthfully, I’ve never tried.

Which writers inspire you?

Barbara Kingsolver – I still re-read The Poisonwood Bible now and again. Frank Rich is incredible at analyzing the muck that emanates from our broken political system. Everyone who writes for the New Yorker. Maira Kalman, who writes with pictures. Joan Didion, who helped me through my grief. My mother. Anyone who leaves me changed just by having read their words, and that includes people I haven’t even read yet.

Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and Shanghai Girls. Her latest novel, Dreams of Joy, is now available in paperback.

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Would you name three things that inspire you to write?

The desire to find out more about something that intrigues me, the desire to delve deeply into a single emotion (like love), and the desire to stay happy and busy.

What is one essential element of your writing process?

A thousand words a days, no matter what.

Of all the places that you’ve visited, which one stands out most in your mind?

Cambodia.

Would you describe your work space? 

I work in a very bright and airy room that overlooks our garden. However, I have bamboo blinds covering the window right where I work and my desk faces the wall so I won’t get distracted.  On my desk, I have Chinese wind-up toys, things my children made for me in elementary school (including a lamp with a shade made entirely of buttons – a second grade project), and all the notebooks I’ve used to take notes for each of my books.

What book have you reread most?

The Jungle Book, Volume II

Of all your work, is there a character you feel closest to?

Yes!  There’s a character that has appeared in all my books. In Dreams of Joy, she was Madame Hu; in Shanghai Girls, she was Pearl’s mother-in-law; in Peony in Love, she was the grandmother; in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, she was the matchmaker; in my three mysteries, she was the Neighborhood Committee Director; and in On Gold Mountain, my book about my family, she was my actual grandmother. Writing about my grandmother, who’s been gone many years now, allows me to be with her every day.

If you could offer a childhood version of yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Don’t worry so much.