All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from Koreans and combatants and aid workers. And I spoke to relatives. A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period - 1950-1956 - and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI's and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture.

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.