I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

I find I have to touch what I am working on every day, or a deep-seated dread kicks in that is very hard to overcome.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

I think we think that parenthood is confined to the country of mothers, but I think a lot of the men I've spoken to and the men who have read my books - I've been surprised by this actually - have a fierce attachment to being parents and to being fathers. And just as we, a lot of women I know, want this, men too want to pass down what they have to pass down.

I wanted a baby of color, to be honest, because I wasn't attached to the idea that I look like the biological mother. I liked the idea of the adoption being clear; it was and is not something I am interested in hiding.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.