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

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.

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

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

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.