I don’t know, I’m twenty-eight now. By the time I wrote What in God’s Name my life had changed a lot. I wasn’t a scared sad teenager anymore. I was a grown-up person who had fallen in love, who had experienced a lot of wonderful things in my life. I’m not consciously trying to write redemptive books or uplifting stories, but as someone who’s ultimately pretty earnest and optimistic, my books kind of take on that color.

CD: You don’t seem to use comedy as therapy. I’m always frustrated by the idea that to be a successful comedian you have to be emotionally damaged.

SR: I think that’s a really good point. I think that even when I was a teenager, my funniest pieces were not the ones where I was angry. That’s not to say that there aren’t funny comedians who are angry, but to this day all of my favorite comedy writers, all of my favorite humorists, have been pretty universal and accessible and very few of them write from a place of anger.

Guys like David Sedaris or Roald Dahl, they’re not satirists, they’re not nasty critics laying into different aspects of society. They’re writing about funny traits that a lot of humans have in common.

CD: Who are some other writers that you like?

SR: I like writers who come up with good hooks and good premises and it doesn’t necessarily matter to me if they’re funny. For example, I really like Stephen King, I really like Jerzy Kosinski. Kosinki, if you read a book like Cockpit or Blind Date, it’s just one hook after the other. It keeps ensnaring you. 

CD: There’s also an aspect to those books where the horror premise could easily become comedy if written by someone else.