I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect.

It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.

In terms of music, each novel is different but I usually find my way into an era through the music. In this novel the New People, I listened to a lot of 90s hip-hop, which was just so genius. Also, all the musical references in the book from the Peoples Temple one and only album to Luther Vandross.

I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.

My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.

Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.