I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

Certainly I had from an early age a sense of the power and beauty of religious texts - the awesome magnitude of the Bible stories I was reading as a child. The hymns. The sermons. I can still vividly hear the sermons and the pieces of soft piano music played after them, the preacher asking if anyone wanted to come up to the altar and accept Christ as their savior.

At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else. The Church isn't why I'm a writer, but it's probably a part of it.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I started to go to Catholic churches, by myself. Not because I wanted to be Catholic, but because I wanted to light a candle and say something like a prayer and just sit there. There was something I was missing or trying to reconnect with. But it was a secret at the time. I'd developed this cynical persona and the last thing I wanted to admit was that I was skulking around churches in my spare time.

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.