I have never written a novel that volleys back and forth between a couple of different first person perspectives. It's definitely a challenge because I had to think about who knows what, when do they know it, when are they sharing what they know or what they think they know, how the reader's perspective affects things. Telling the story in that way is challenging. It does require a lot of revision.

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

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.

It felt like an indulgence. Going back was painful, but, at the same time, it was nice to live with them again for a few pages. I got to live with my brother again for the entire book. Of course as I'm writing the book, I'm getting closer and closer to the end and I know what that means. I knew exactly where I was heading. It was really difficult, but it was nice to make them come alive for those scenes. It was good.

I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.

Black people in the US are told all the time, from all aspects, that they're nothing, that they're less than. And of course that bears fruit, but no one wants to shoulder part of the blame. A lot of people here can't see around their own family's history. They don't want to see that where they come from and the people they surround themselves with might have played a role in all this. This is all part of our national myth about the individual. We think that a lack of success comes from the individual not working hard enough. A lot of people in this country really believe that.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.