If you look at the list of the top wheat importers for 2010, almost half of them are Middle Eastern regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia. Egypt is the number-one importer of wheat in the entire world. Tunisia leads the entire world in per capita wheat consumption. So it's no wonder that the revolutions began with Tunisians waving baguettes in the streets and Egyptians wearing helmets made of bread.

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.

We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery-shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives.

Americans are curious about the texture of everyday life in the Middle East because they rarely get to see it. I wanted readers to feel like they were sitting around the dinner table with me and my friends, hearing what average people really say and really think, [where] the dinner table is the best place to find out.

Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that it messes with our assumptions - not just about Iraq, but about culture and human nature.

One of the unspoken themes that I'm grappling with in Day of Honey is the relationship between violence and cosmopolitanism. It's one thing to comprehend violence as an outgrowth of ignorance, poverty, and backwardness. It's another matter entirely to confront incredible atrocities in a country with a rich civic and intellectual life.

You [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, then why haven't you converted to Islam?" Interestingly enough, almost every person who asked me that was a Sunni, and it was their not-so-subtle way of implying that my Shiite husband was a bad Muslim for letting his infidel wife run around unconverted.