The Girls' tells the story of Rose and Ruby Darlen, who are not only literally but spiritually attached for eternity. Born joined at the head in 1974 to a feckless teenage mother who abandons them, and reared by a delightfully open-minded adoptive couple, the Darlen girls are darling girls, indeed.

In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.

That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

I grew up listening to spiritual music, Blind Willie Johnson and folk.

The word of God steadies me. He says your trials and tribulations make you who you are. So you can see my whole story in the way I endured and overcame some testing experiences.

It is possible to demonstrate God's existence, although not a priori, yet a posteriori from some work of His more surely known to us.