It sounds as though you experience your work as very idea-driven. Is that something you've been moving toward, or something you feel you've been doing all along?

I think all along. I'm not sure my first novel reads that way, exactly. It's a much more emotional story, more straightforward, but it was totally idea-driven. I was fascinated by the fact that image culture was born in the '60s. Todd Gitlin's book "The Whole World Is Watching" about the interplay between SDS and the media is something I read in college and that really interested me. I could talk very theoretically about that book, but most people would say, "What are you talking about? This is a book about two girls and a girl whose older sister has committed suicide." But I think the ideas are pretty palpable in it. For me a story is just not interesting if there isn't a philosophical query along with it.

Do you feel that's an unusual position to be in when writing American fiction? Has it been hard for you to have that aspect of your work appreciated?

I was frustrated that my first novel wasn't read in that way very often. I don't know if that's because I'm a woman and it was a story about sisters so there was an immediate assumption that there certainly couldn't be anything very intellectual going on there -- or whether the ideas that drove me to write it don't appear in the book to the extent that I think they do. I don't know. It was so important to me, the "thought" part of it, that just having people respond to the emotions of the story was satisfying, sure -- I want to feel things when I read, don't get me wrong -- but that seemed to come at the exclusion of the other.

I also feel sometimes that I'm not sure exactly what tradition I'm part of. I hate about myself the fact that I tend to model myself consciously after male writers. And I think that's because again there's this association that I'm very suspicious of that somehow men take on the big topics more than women do, which I don't think is necessarily true. But I sometimes fall prey to that supposition myself, and I sometimes feel a bit confused about what I fit into. But what I'm trying to do in the work itself, that seems clear to me, and I think that's what's most important.

Who are those male writers you model yourself after? The idea that there's a split between male and female writers in America is something people have been talking about lately because of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections."

That whole thing is so interesting because so much was made of the fact that he wrote about a family, as if this were some kind of revelatory notion. I imagine that reading a headline like that about a book by a woman would be laughable -- because the presumption is of course that it would be about a family. Yet this was seen as a really unusual thing to do for a brainy male writer. It's almost a clichi to say it but like so many people of my generation, I've really soaked up my DeLillo and find him extremely compelling as a model. Robert Stone is someone I've read and enjoyed a lot. I'd call them both fairly global in their perspective and quite idea-driven.

I haven't had the sense that Jonathan Franzen clearly has that there's some kind of crisis in American fiction, but I've read with interest his remarks. I agree with his goal of wanting to fuse the emotional with the intellectual. When I read that in the New York Times, I thought, yes, that's exactly what my goal has been this whole time. He said it beautifully and I entirely agree. Still, reading something that falls more to one side than the other can be extremely satisfying. It doesn't have to be both. A book that is strong emotionally and resonates always seems to resonate beyond the story it's telling, even in an intellectual way.

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