'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.

I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.

For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.

I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.

That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.

I discovered I was a monotheist... That rules out polytheism. I have also had a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or leader who claims to be God's representative on Earth.