I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

My tweeting is cool and calm unless I am riled up about something and then I just surrender to the fury of my fingers.

With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.

I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don't focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer.

Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.

The designation is useful and necessary and sometimes limiting but it is only limiting to people who think, for example, that African-American literature couldn't possibly be something they could be interested in or relate to. They have limited imaginations, which is sad.