"My stories tend to start out with people: a child prodigy who hits the wall of his intellectual talents. A religious but not fundamentalist Muslim in the South. A young woman kept alive but uncured by a novel cancer treatment. These characters mix with questions that interest and/or haunt me: Why are we so interested in leaving a legacy? Can we construct meaning in a world that is so profoundly apathetic toward us? Is it possible to have a full life without having a long life? That’s where my books start, really. They begin at the intersection between people I’m imagining and questions that bug me."