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MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: My third novel, Flesh and Blood, received a withering, truly venomous review from Michiko Kakucani in the daily New York Times. It was, in a sense, my worst fear come true: a devastating review that was read by millions of people. I'm not prone to vomiting, as Hellman was, thoug…

In the scene he cannot help but re-imagine each day, one of the saleswomen darts after him into the street, calling out, “Hey! Hey!” and he stops, and the young woman points at his abdomen and says to him, “Hey! You didn't pay for that soap!” and Edwin looks at her, his eyes welling up with tears, …

What else could I be? I guess to be an American writer means, uh, that I have dined multiply at drive-through windows and that I have no choice but to occasionally darken the inside of a shopping mall, and that I come from a country of former slave-owners, and that I feel the Manhattan Project as a…

When I was on tour people would say, I’m so sorry about your mother, as if the work was transparently autobiographical. But my mother is in the pink, and grateful for many things, except for the fact that she has a writer for a son. You’re correct that writing about sons and mothers is deeply deman…

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a daily schedule you try to stick to when you’re working?

MOODY

No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother. Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, f…