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.

When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.

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.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

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.

Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.

When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of your family and they become the symbols of your family life, and your unit out in the world. In that moment I wanted to allude to the fact that the way my parents' relationship was falling apart was impacting me and my brother, my parents, but also our symbols.