I get plenty of time to re-engage with the world I'm trying to depict, so I'm not always living in these parallel worlds.
I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they're meant to. My husband is a really fantastic cook. His mother is Italian and if you walk into our house, we assume you're starving.
One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.