Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black.

I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.

I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.

My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.