As my own emotional life has become a little bit less tangled and turbulent and conflicted, I've been able, as a writer, to approach the characters and the world that they live in more directly. As a novelist, I have access to certain tools and strategies—for lack of a better word—that perhaps a person normally doesn't have just because, for instance, memory is a crucial novelist tool that has to be cultivated and preserved. And so I'm forced again and again through that to go back to my own childhood.

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