(Transcription from the conversation.)

I think I’m a very harsh person. How to say, a wolf in lamb’s clothing. I look very relaxed but I’m a very harsh and aggressive person. I think it has to do with my upbringing because I’m a child of two holocaust survivors - my mother saw her mother and father killed in front of her eyes. I grew up with this notion that I feel all kinds of urges that I need to ignore. Something that was completely built in. When as a child I fell off the bike and fractured my skull, they took me to hospital, and because the injury was close to the brain they couldn’t use antiseptic. When they stitched me my mother was in the room, and when they saw I didn’t cry they thought something was wrong with my head. When you put a needle in a 7 year old’s head 36 times he usually cries. My doctor said to me: “Hey little boy, does this hurt you.” And I said, “How about you shut up and do your work. And I’ll just lie here until you finish.” My family likes to tell this story, but it’s really a story about repression. Sometimes an interviewer will ask me a question and I just want to strangle them [Was he talking about me? – AP] but I’ll still answer it very politely.

In that case I think there is something about fiction that it’s a space where you can be yourself. In my life there were hundreds of girls that I felt like kissing while talking to them but I understood it would be out of line, but in my stories my characters can kiss them. What you say harsh in them is basically an inner knowledge of me as a writer that their actions don’t have any consequence on other human beings. Let’s say that my character kicks a kid in the park, but no kid gets kicked. You can kill somebody but no one gets killed. So this makes it a perfect place for an emotional laboratory where you can ask yourself what am I feeling. If I can just be myself what would I do? Of course we are social animals so I wouldn’t want to act like my characters in the real world, but I acknowledge the feeling in my story.