I don't ever rest. It's a problem and hopefully something I will get a better handle on in the coming years.

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.

What is it like to be connected to someone you can never get away from, for better or worse? I love trying to answer that question.

If I cannot rest and relax, all the work I do is for naught.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.

It's a very weird cultural perception that if you're fat you're dumb, that you're lazy or a loser. Clearly, those are the preconditions for fatness. You're a failure, because only a lazy person, only a dumb person, would allow themselves to get into this situation. It's appalling that this is the mindset. People generally treat fat people like we don't know anything about anything. It's incredibly demeaning. And incredibly frustrating.