Amity Gaige

“In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.”

“Let's admit it; the only use for complaining is to make people laugh.”

“I think I have a very American desire and willingness to divulge everything. I would divulge more if I didn't know it wasn't smart.”

“My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.”

“I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand.”

“It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.”

“I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.”

“I loved Madeleine L'Engle as a child - 'A Wrinkle in Time.'”

“I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.”

“I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart.”

“I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.”

“Don't let anyone tell you there's only one way to write.”

“When you feel the need to moan and groan, laugh with woeful recognition and eat flaky pastries. If you hear yourself taking the art of complaining a little too seriously, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish, exactly.”

“Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.”

“For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories.”

“There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.”

“Parenthood is a psychic sweat lodge: enter into it only if you are ready to have your own secreted toxins running into your eyes. Few people are prepared for its power - women or men.”

“My personal writing philosophy is to try and write better every day.”

“In the name of 'mutual assistance,' the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.”

“Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.”