I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

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."

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

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.