I am trying to keep growing and improving as a writer.

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

It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.

I wrote myself back together. I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself . . . Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are.

It is deeply unfair to task writers of color with unique responsibilities that we don't assign to all writers.

The idea of life in France is a utopia where the women are beautiful and they eat cheese all day and wear designer clothes and are magically thin and more evolved. And that's wonderful. Over here, we're still fighting for birth control.

Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.