JESSE ANDREWS

I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.

'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

There's a certain trope in young adult fiction. A young girl gets cancer and becomes this radiant person who's a fountain of insight. Everyone who encounters her is changed for the better. That doesn't happen all the time. The whole thing is much more difficult to process. Adults have trouble with it, so why shouldn't we expect teens to?

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

I never took creative writing.

In a way, there's nothing new under the sun, so anything you write about has been written about by other people. All you can do is bring yourself to it, bring as much honesty as you can to it.

As a teenager, I was undeveloped and out of touch. The arts was another arena in which to do combat and challenge myself. I read difficult books like James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' but I didn't really understand it, and no one was going to call me on it because I was 16.

If something is being written about a lot, there's a conversation there; there's a dialogue there. There's probably a reason for it that it resonates deeply in some way.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

I'm influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.

If you're in a band for long enough, you see your bandmates at their best and their worst, and if you can stick together through that, you're basically family to each other.

You want a storybook kind of closure with someone when they die, but I think that kind of thing is impossible.

I watched a ton of films growing up, but in a haphazard way. There was nothing scholarly or focused about it.

My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that's the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

My tastes are pretty varied. For instance, I love Wilco. But it's considered dad rock. It's one of my favorite bands, and yet I find it impossible not to think of myself as a dad-in-training when I listen to it.

You show up at high school, there's all these kids you don't know, and you're terrified that people will have some kind of wrong or unpleasant impression of you. You just don't want anything to ruin your public persona, because you actually have a public persona in high school.

My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.

Everyone's got this hidden infinity that you only get glimpses of. They're always more complex than your conception of them will allow.

I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.

I went to a really diverse and wonderful school in inner-city Pittsburgh, where all the various groups and types of people got along pretty great, and a lot of interesting stuff was going on all the time - and I still hated high school. It's just a rough, rough period in one's life.

Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.

It wasn't until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me... That's when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.

I was in a lot of bands growing up.