Sarah Koenig

My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote 'Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.' He named Earth Day 'Earth Day.' It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily.

I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.

Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.