Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.