Lately I’ve been pondering the importance and influence of place in fiction. When I first started out, I was living in New York City, a struggling journalist from unglamorous roots, making her way in the most glamorous scene in the world—making mistakes like drinking out of a brandy snifter and having no clue how to use a fish knife. Naturally, my fiction was inspired by this world. In my fiction, I’d tried to revisit the landscape of my childhood back then, but I hadn’t been ready to do so properly, and the draft I’d worked up felt forced and phony. I’d shelved even the topic—which, in essence a coming of age story, was certainly universal—for nearly six years before I revisited not so much the topic, but as I was to learn later, the important bit: the condensed feeling of the experience, in an abbreviated sense, in THE VELVET ROPE DIARIES. It was much easier to explore this landscape—both physically and emotionally—because I’d distanced myself from it, and this made all the difference. So, you see—distance from a place is one way you can impact your use of it.