India, Oct. 17 -- 1You once said that you "kind of ran out of life", having already leveraged your experiences in poetry and memoir. I think perhaps, more than having "run out of life", I felt at the time that I had run out of events, which necessitated the invention of events that lends itself to fiction. Inevitably, and positively, I think all literature carries the marks of its maker, whether that's in some power of observation or a particular viewpoint, even if the maker has to invent characters or plot lines in order to be themselves differently, or more fully. We have singular experiences, though not as many as we might think, since all experiences share common threads across people, but what is really singular about us is the way we think, and the best writing carries the mark of that mind, or tries to. 2You invoke William Blake in the epigraph. What does his work mean to you? I find Blake's work so powerful, not only for its bizarreness - and no one could argue that he was not a bizarre writer and painter - but for its radical counter-culturalism. So much of his writing, and I'm thinking particularly about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, offers shocking and transgressive ideas about love, sex, desire, and joy. I remember reading him when I was younger and being shocked but also liberated by his ideas, especially his proverbs. Like: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." I was in love with the simplicity and infallibility of lines such as: "Dip him in the river who loves water." But, most of all, I think he gave me licence to experience the joy of making things, and the joy and necessity of expression. I have a T-shirt with his painting of Newton on it. And, above my desk, the line "Exuberance is beauty." 3In the Prologue to Open, Heaven, you write about the "imagined reversal", the "return" towards one's past, as both an exercise in fictionalising the real and realising the fictional, making what had transpired somewhat bearable. Do time, and the distance it provides, have a role to play in this novel? I was interested in giving this texture of uncertainty to Open, Heaven. As much as it is about the thing that is returned to, it is also about the act of returning, the failure to return (or the inability to return), and the ways in which the narrator elides certain things, so that the reader is set the task of figuring out what is real and what is not. I liked having two timelines for the novel, 2002-03, and 2022, though we only visit 2022 twice, briefly. Mainly, this was because it set up a sort of echo over time, and gaps that could only be filled with suggestion and recurrence. We all have our own fictions; I would go as far as to say the majority of our life is a sort of fiction. And love, which is the real core of Open, Heaven, is a great spur to fiction. When we fall in love, we tell ourselves stories about the person we fall in love with, and we hope that the story we've told ourselves comes true. But in Open, Heaven the truth sometimes remains unclear, and is lost in the gaps between memories, or between characters....