When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."

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

This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.

Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.