No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

I think because of these big issues of life and death that maybe sex feels like a crass question. But for Christ sake, this is a book that is so interested in an elemental human condition. And one of the ideas about surrender is an erotic surrender, too. These folks are surrendered by destiny; they surrender to each other in certain moments, but there is a lot of erotic surrender.

We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.