All I heard from everybody around was yes or no, and that’s it – no debate, no further thought, no trying to invest yourself in the character of another culture and seeing how they might feel. So that’s what novelists can do.
     And as far as fundamentalism is concerned, yes, I’ve written a lot about cults and cult leaders – Kinsey, Kellogg, Frank Lloyd Wright, the psychiatrists in Riven Rock. No one seems to know how to take control of his or her own life. We need guidance from the talking heads on TV; we need psychiatrists; we need how-to books. I’m suspicious of all of that. I don’t need a leader to tell me what to do. I want to find out for myself.

At the same time, life as a solitary writer can be isolating, though you have said that you find a great deal of inspiration by being alone in the wilderness. What do you find there? I was a hyperactive kid. They didn’t have the term back in those days, but just look at me. We had a back door, and that’s how my mother dealt with hyperactivity. I was outside my whole childhood, and I’ve never lost a love of that. When I wound up moving to L.A., I discovered the very first year a place in the Sequoia National Forest. I call it Big Timber in my fiction – this is where A Friend of the Earth ends – and I’ve been going up there ever since. It’s like a super kind of kid’s dream of what the woods might be like. I love to work up there, because it’s boring. But being in the woods by myself is very important to me.