People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

There are certain things that happen in New York that just don't happen anywhere else.

Sometimes I highjack memories. Sometimes I switch them around. Sometimes they're just in the background, like some little bass note. Those things have carried me through, especially when I first started writing. They're still there, but more in the distance these days.

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely independent, and you know this book was a hard sell. No one wanted to buy this book. But she did, and so it's paid off for her, I hope.

I've also never written anything really in LA.