"I am one of four siblings who are very close in age, and when we were children, our parents developed elaborate tactics for keeping us from attacking strangers and each other. We traveled a lot as a family (to places like Cambodia and Peru), and to prevent us from beating up the flight attendants, our parents told us that we all had to keep journals during these trips. I took it very seriously, and it taught me a lot about how to be a careful observer.

"At home, my parents would also assign creative projects to us in order to keep us out of their hair. We'd come home from school and our mother would tell us to write a play and perform it after dinner. It really worked, because now my two sisters are also published writers (my younger sister published her first novel two years ago and is just finishing a second one; my older sister is a journalist who's written for The New York Times and any other papers and is now working on a first novel) and my brother is a professional animator for television. We still do creative projects together as adults, and we give each other's characters cameos in our books. One of my sisters is a teacher during the year, and during the summer we actually sit in a café and write together.

* * *

"I really think that being a writer is more like having an addiction or a disease than having a job — it's not a choice, it's a chronic condition, and the question is how to deal with it. For me, the big realization wasn't about being a writer, but about writing fiction. I always thought I would become a journalist, and I walked around with notebooks, collecting ideas for non-fiction articles and essays. Then one day I read through one of these notebooks, and I realized that a lot of the things I had jotted down had more in common with each other thematically than I would have expected. It occurred to me that all of these little anecdotes and stories and thoughts were just waiting to be woven together into a single plot. I had never written any fiction at all, not even a short story, until I wrote my first novel.

"One nice thing about writing fiction is that you get to test out ideas without committing yourself to them. I do have deeply held religious beliefs, and I have other beliefs that change as my life changes. But I wrote The World to Come in part as a way of exploring things that I wanted to be true. I think that no matter how rational or secular a person is, there are two things that can never stand up to rational questioning: How can a person who just existed suddenly not exist anymore? And how can someone who never existed suddenly exist? I think we all want to believe in the presence of those who have passed away, and I think we all feel their presence in unexpected ways long after their deaths. The idea in this book of how our deceased ancestors "train" our future descendants by giving them their traits and ways of thinking, might seem strange or "spiritual" (usually a euphemism for "flaky"), but it's really just the reality of genetics. Everyone wants to believe in the revival of the dead, but the truth is that the dead do live. Every aspect of them is preserved within us.

* * *

"In terms of being a 'young Jewish-American writer in the 21st century,' I disagree with the claim that young Jews are rebelling against Judaism. I actually think that young people of every generation like to rebel against their parents, but the circumstances have changed. For Philip Roth's generation, the way to rebel against your parents was to come home and announce that you were marrying a non-Jew and eating pork on Yom Kippur.

"But consider this. People my age (I'm 29) are the grandchildren of people Philip Roth's age. Our parents and grandparents already did the rebellion-against-Judaism thing. If someone my age wants to rebel against his parents, he won't tell them he's eating pork on Yom Kippur and marrying a non-Jew, because his parents probably already did that themselves and wouldn't be bothered by it at all. Instead, if a Jewish person my age really wants to piss off his parents, he'll come home and announce that he's joined Chabad-Lubavitch, that he's growing a beard, that he's getting married at age nineteen and having ten children, and that he refuses to eat in his parents' house because it's not kosher enough for him. I've taught college courses in Jewish literature, and it's always astonishing to me how many of my students find their way into varieties of Jewish life (religious, secular, cultural) that their parents would never have imagined.

"Philip Roth was first published fifty years ago — in a very different America, where being seen as a Jewish writer was a career-killer. Now it's practically a marketing asset. But I also think that most writers of Philip Roth's generation actually didn't know very much about Judaism or even Jewish culture. They were essentially writing about the second-generation immigrant experience, about assimilating into American life. My work is quite different because I've written about the content of Jewish tradition, which most of the earlier writers didn't. Most writers are fearful of being labeled because they feel it may limit their work or their audience. But I've actually been surprised by how much non-Jewish readers have taken to my books. I've spoken at churches, and I get a lot of mail from non-Jewish and even religiously Christian readers. The beauty of literature is that it becomes universal precisely through its particulars."

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Dara Horn is an award-winning novelist, essayist, professor and scholar. this portrait was painted with Dara Horn's words, by Ariella Saperstein's pen.Ariella Saperstein is Assistant director at the Anti-Defamation League's New York Regional Office, covering international, public policy and campus issues.