I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively making these decisions when I'm writing. I wanted to communicate in the book that on one hand, being at home - both in our homes and in DeLisle - gives us a sense of belonging and family and safety, but at the same time, being in those places makes us less safe.

When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.

I consider myself a progressive, so my answer would be that we need to be progressive. For some reason the people in power in Mississippi still seem to be invested in these very American myths."The individual is alone." "We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." "We create success for ourselves, and if we work hard enough then we will succeed and have success beyond our wildest dreams." I think that we need to do away with that kind of thinking and be more aware of history and how the history of this place bears in the present and how it affects people.

I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.

Living in the rural South, you sometimes feel trapped, like you don't have any options. It grinds people down, and of course it leads to substance abuse. I see it all around me. So many people in my family, probably more than 50 percent, have had substance abuse problems, either currently or in the past. It's so personal and immediate to me.

I felt like if I didn't write about what happened to the young men here in the South of America, the same things would keep occurring. Here in the South, young black men just keep dying - young black women, too. I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't been as honest as possible about that.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.