You rarely include yourself as a character in your work but at the same time your work feels very personal, since the stories are filtered through your hand and mind. How much of that is intentional?

Yeah, my work is not confessional or memoiristic. But I feel incredibly invested in the people that I write about. I feel a deep sense of responsibility when someone trusts me with their stories or their time. So that feels personal.

Would you ever write about yourself in a first-person way?

I have thought about it, but there are so many other things I’d rather do. A big motivation for me is curiosity about what I don’t know. I prefer to explore places that I haven’t been, and talk to interesting people that I might not otherwise encounter.

You have had such a cool career, your books are so well-received, you have all these things going on and your art is so beautiful, and then there’s the MacArthur genius grant, and the Pulitzer Prize nomination. … Do you feel successful? Or at what point did you feel like you had arrived in the life you’re currently living?

Wow. Well, a few things: I definitely separate out recognition from how I make sense of my own trajectory. I’m grateful for it, and there’s no question that recognition has made it possible for me to do my work. It wasn’t always clear that it would be the case. The work I make is pretty weird, in certain ways. The first book I did was rejected by every publisher in existence, I think. No one returned my phone calls. I had like six different day jobs.

I try not to take anything for granted. I see the cracks in my work, I see what isn’t up to snuff and that’s what I focus on. Each project gives me ideas for the future; I see what I could have done. Going into any new project, I picture some kind of sublime ideal of what could be. Then I start working, and what I’m able to accomplish in the end of course never matches up to that ideal. But with each project I try to narrow that gap a little. If each project narrows that gap between the vision and the reality even a little bit, that feels like progress.

One last goofy question. Are there any weather-related details from Thunder & Lightning—my favorite book of yours—that still stand out in memory?

I think about fog a lot! About the actual phenomenon, but also fog as a metaphor. In some ways I think of a good portion of my life as living in a bit of a fog. And then feeling that fog lift at a certain point with certain things that have happened.

And now that I have kids, it’s a pleasure to have a bit of knowledge about the physics of lightning, or why dew forms, or whatever, to be able to talk about that. That’s really fun.

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