After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.