War is too strange to be processed alone.

War is too strange to be processed alone.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.