“As a seven-year-old, I remember when Etan Patz disappeared and was immortalized as the first missing-child face on a milk carton.”

“Every year, I give my dad an advance copy of my latest book. He reads it over the next several nights and says something incredibly supportive. Then he clears his throat nervously and changes the subject.”

“I finished 'Heartsick' with my daughter asleep in her bassinet by my desk, a feat that any new mother will tell you cannot be sufficiently praised.”

“I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.”

“I love the fact that we are surrounded by this spectacular natural beauty that routinely strikes us dead. Hikers walk off into the woods and are never seen again. And still we tug on our fleece and skip off into the wilderness, not a care in the world.”

“I often keep my eyes open for bodies. I do. Ever since I was a kid. I think I read too many 'Nancy Drew' books.”

“I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.”

“I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.”

“I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town.”

“I was obsessed with Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.”

“I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.”

“I'm a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues.”

“I'm usually too shy to write on planes because I assume that everyone on board is as nosy as I am and will look over my shoulder and read what I'm writing.”

“I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.”

“I've written books for awhile, but always on a pretty small scale and always pretty self-indulgent. I chose projects that I thought would be really fun to work on and found friends to work on them with me, and it was all about the process.”

“Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.”

“My husband and I were excited about having a kid - it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class.”

“Often we don't even know what we think ourselves about people in our lives.”

“People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.”

“People read stuff over your shoulder when you're in public, and when you write the kind of stuff I do, and people read it over your shoulder, it makes you a little self-conscious.”

“Somehow, having an office that I had to go to made me want to work from home, which is easier to do if you don't have a boss waiting for you at the office, even a very blue office.”

“There's not a lot of arc in an actual psychopath.”

“There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that.”

“When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.”

“Worst part of being a writer: having to tell my toddler that I can't play with her because I'm working. Keep in mind that working consists of me at home with a laptop on my lap sitting on the couch. It doesn't look like working. I don't have a hammer or anything.”

“You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and then I'm giving you sadness and guilt.”