WHY DO YOU WRITE?

Randall Jarrell wrote: 'The ways we miss our lives are life'. That's one of the many reasons I write – to account for what goes missing.

ARE YOU A VIVID DREAMER?

I have a recurring dream about discovering an enticing space in my own home – a basement or garden – always just out of reach. Its residue is an elated sense of creative possibility. I like the sign the symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux put on his door before sleep: Poet at work.

WHERE ARE YOU HAPPIEST?

With my family, in unlikely places: the hospital where I gave birth to my children. I was once plainly happy alone in Berlin, and New York, but having children changes solitude. You're never so austerely alone again.