The insider-outsider dichotomy might be interesting to apply to readers. For instance, I read as an outsider, albeit an interested one, in Paradise, New York, even though I actually vacationed at that other hotel which will remain unnamed. But because of the important issues raised in Breaking and Entering that spill far beyond the Michigan borders, I feel like an insider despite never having been there. Is there any way to comment on that?

No matter what I write, I think about my audience — who’s going to feel like an insider, who’s going to feel like an outsider, how the reader might react…

No matter what I write, I think about my audience – who’s going to feel like an insider, who’s going to feel like an outsider, how the reader might react to not knowing this world, how the reader might react to knowing this world as well as I do, or even better. When I wrote Paradise, New York, I thought that anyone who had grown up in an insular religious or cultural or ethnic world would understand the questions I was trying to explore. In a way, I was writing about identity politics; I was trying to ask why people need to identify themselves according to difference rather than similarity. But I underestimated the extent to which some readers would find themselves distanced by my references to Jewish culture and religion. By the time I wrote Breaking and Entering, I wanted to write for a more general audience. I was stunned to realize that readers on both coasts had no idea what I was talking about. It took quite a few years for the novel to find a publisher. But then everyone started talking about Red States and Blue States, and Tea Parties and Militias, and Evangelical Christians and creationists in the schools, and even people in Manhattan started to get what the book was about, so it finally found a home.

And I hope there was no value judgment implied in my saying how I positioned myself in either book. The various glimpses Paradise, New York provided into Jewish culture and religion in a narrowly identified time and place were welcoming, rather than distancing to me, whereas I felt uncomfortably immersed in the issues of Breaking and Entering. Toward the book’s end, Louise thinks, “Mutual paranoia can be the deadliest risk of all” — I’m interested in the technical choices you made to contain all this material, specifically point of view.

All I can say is that I initially wrote Breaking and Entering in multiple points of view. Louise’s chapters were in first person and the chapters from Richard’s and Molly’s and Matt’s and Ames’s points of view were written in third person. The chapters just came to me that way. But at some point I realized that was a clumsy way to write the book, so I recast all the chapters in third person past tense. By the time the novel was published years later, I was afraid that people were going to wonder why the narrator didn’t seem more cognizant of other instances of domestic terrorism, the Tea Party, 9/11, etc. I wanted to recreate Louise’s uncertainty at the time — as you say, her paranoia. So I recast the entire novel in present tense.