The short story is that 2005 started out unusually wet ... so that at the end of February we had the wettest start to any year on record.

When you look at the averages you find out that in general, we're a little wetter than normal statewide. But the downside of that is that the last 2 1/2 months have been quite dry, and that we're actually at one of the slowest starts to our snow accumulation season in the past 10 years.

You can't take one event and substitute it for an entire winter's worth of snow, which we didn't get.

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?...

I don’t know what else to say."
"There is nothing else to say. A few minutes of words can’t change years of absurdity.