I have spent most of my adult life thinking and writing about place—the Midwest where I lived for thirty years, the California that is my birthright, and most recently, the deep South where I now live. My fiction is filled with surly teenagers, uneasy priests, infidelity, enduring love, people who have every reason to be happy but are not, and people who have no earthly reason to be as happy as they are. Sometimes those people annoy others around them.

That, I think, is comedy.