Ever since my first book, She's Got Issues, got published, the first question everyone asked me was, "How do you think up your characters?" At first I lied. I said, "Um . . . I don’t know, I guess they're a composite of people I've met over the years." I thought that sounded good. I've heard other authors use that line, so I figured, what the hell.

But the truth is . . . I hear voices. I can easily imagine how frightening that must sound to people who don’t. That's why I typically keep that information to myself.

A while ago, I just couldn't take it anymore so I went into my bathroom with a tape recorder and put together a tape of voices that are constantly vying for attention in my head. You can't imagine the racket I live with on a daily basis. But I never complain. Mostly because I'm so grateful that my affliction never developed into the other kind of "hearing voices." Schizophrenia has got to be infinitely more distracting.

When I made my CD of voices, I started with cartoon characters and then I moved on to friends, relatives and neighbors. Before long, I had a little story going about someone who was eavesdropping on their neighbor’s conversations which were accidentally being picked up on their baby monitor. The idea of me making a tape of voices started out as a joke. The next thing I knew I had a CD and my husband was playing it at parties as soon as I left the room. He’s much funnier in person.

Anyway, once I got the voices on tape, one by one, they all seemed to disappear. But then, another whole crop of voices took up the little vacancy and before I knew it, I was putting them down on paper. My whole book is about people talking to each other. I take full credit for writing it but the truth is all I did was write down what other people were saying.