I'm often drawn in by a description of a woman thinking something familiar that's never been articulated before, as in Diane Cook's 'Somebody's Baby' or Nina Berberova's 'The Tattered Cloak.'
Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.
I've always had a dog phobia.
I think this is how life is. It's not a linear march through time; you revolve around the same old things as you age and acquire experiences.
Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrongheaded. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.
As a young artist working in multiple mediums, the work and especially the writings of artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were very important to me.