My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.