DANIELLE TRUSSONI

As a girl, I used to zip myself into a snowsuit, fall into the deepest snowdrift I could find and sweep my arms and legs into the powder, making snow angels that would crumble within minutes of their genesis. Despite their rapid disappearance, something about these frozen, evanescent angels has stayed with me ever since.

I started listening to the Cure around the time I discovered Joy Division and, like Joy Division, they have shaped my taste in all sorts of dark and dreary ways.

If I'm not writing, I'm not fully living. It has become the essential element that defines who I am.

Since the Middle Ages, people have been writing about angels. Angelology was actually at one point a scholastic discipline.

People don't actually think there is such a thing out there as angel research.

Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.

These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

Don't stay in a bad situation - whether it is a relationship or a job - out of fear of failure. It's not a failure to walk away and choose to be happy. It takes a lot of courage.

I was fifteen then, too young to fall in-love. Or maybe it is only then, with dew of childhood still in my eyes, that I was capable of such love. I will never know, of course.

In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.

One thing that I don't ever want to do is write something I don't love.

Stories of a mythical angel paradise called an Angelopolis are like Peter Pan's Never Never Land.

I'm sure that growing up in the Midwest played a role in my chronic escapism. In fact, before I lived in France, I lived in Japan, England, and Bulgaria. I was determined to experience other places and cultures, particularly because I had the perception that I'd been cut off from these experiences as a child.

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

One is but a shade of the other.

Even the good angels, I think, would inspire in humans some sort of fear.

When I was little, I went to a Catholic school and was required to go to church every morning and with my parents on Sundays, so I spent a lot of time sitting on a wooden pew. Angels are sort of a relief. If you're looking around, the other imagery is so dark and heavy. Looking at the beautifully rendered pictures of angels was more uplifting.

If people start pulling away the stereotypes of what angels are instead of these fluffy, teddy-bear kinds of angels, then they'll see, historically, that they were terrifying in some depictions. In the Bible, from what I remember, often the reaction to angels is one of terror.

I understood that the stories we believe have power over us. They work into our bodies and minds and change us from inside out. What if one day these stories become something stronger, more real, than fairy tales?

Maybe that is what marriage is: Two people creating a cult together.

That's l'amour: we willingly walk into the future blindfolded.

When we are no longer capable of love, we are no longer alive.

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

If there are too many cooks in the kitchen, the dish is not going to work out.