Chloe Benjamin

Identity is as absurd and contradictory, I think - and certainly as mutable - as the human brain.

I wish I'd had more fun in college. I spent a lot of time in my dorm room, reading or writing while listening to my Sarah McLachlan Pandora station.

Teaching was an incredible experience, and I miss it a lot, but I also love the job I have now.

I work at a non-profit called ALS Worldwide, where we work with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) patients and families. It is often heavy work, but I'm grateful to be able to contribute to the ALS community. I'm constantly learning about science and medicine, and I have the honor of corresponding with patients throughout the world.

We forget that most questions in this world - the ones that really matter - are impossible to answer completely.

None of us know what comes after death. All of us, to some extent, are probably mystified or maybe a little bit frightened of it.

My mom is Episcopalian; my dad is ancestrally Jewish but personally atheist. After their divorce, however, my dad married a Jewish spiritual director, and I became fascinated by the traditions she brought into our lives.

Sometimes, we writers find the perfect research material. I can't overstate how how precious that feels - it's as though you're having an intimate conversation with someone who has the key to unlock your project.

I grew up in San Francisco, and I trained as a ballet dancer until college.

When people ask how I came up with the concept for my second novel, 'The Immortalists' - four siblings visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell anyone the date that they will die - I always wish I had a better answer.

I think readers either love or hate nonlinear storytelling, and it's true that it can be more difficult, both to write and to read.

I am somebody who has always struggled with uncertainty. And, of course, uncertainty is so core to life. I seek out knowledge to help me deal with that. But I'm also aware that knowledge can be really a double-edged sword.

I did invent the idea of using lucid dreaming to treat sleep disorders, but I was influenced by many real-life researchers - from forefathers like Freud and Jung to Stephen Laberge and Rosalind Cartwright, who explore lucid dreaming and parasomnias.

I've always been fascinated by dreams - they seem like such intriguing evidence of the brain's obsession with narrative as a form of sense-making. But because dreaming is an unconscious process, we have little control over the stories we tell, so they can be fraught with anxiety, vulnerability, and exposure.

My favorite writer is Alice Munro. It's simply amazing how well she captures entire lifetimes in a single short story.

You can't have bad things happening to characters simply for shock value; you need to provide context.

It's an unbelievable, absurd paradox that we have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing which one will be our last.

I've always been interested in the tension between knowledge and mystery, between science and religion, and the various ways we cope with the unknown. Some of those are productive; some can be attempts to pin down things that are by nature impossible to know.

Magic is still a very white-male-dominated field.

I grew up in San Francisco. And I grew up with gay parents.

I think much of my own quest in life is to figure out how best to cope with my own uncertainties.