When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures--this makes it only more potent.

People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.

I do have a sister - I have two sisters.