Ray Nessly asked T. Coraghessan Boyle:

I love film but it can't capture human thought like fiction can. I admire (along with your very realistic-sounding, first-person voices), your interior monologue style. James Joyce and Virginia Wolff are among those, I think, (pun intended), who introduced interior monologue to fiction. Can you describe how your own, unique, third-person interior monologue style developed?

T. Coraghessan Boyle I quite agree. With the novel, you are the casting director, the actors, the cinematographer and director, and for each reader this experience is unique. More and more I find myself engaging in the use of interior monologue in third-person narration--it enables me to inhabit my characters in the way I inhabit my own brain, i.e., the character who is me. Further, this allows the reader to inhabit them as well so that he/she can dwell in differing points of view, as in The Tortilla Curtain.

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