Bobbie Ann Mason

I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.

Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes.

Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.

I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.

Sometimes a book I'm reading is so terrific that when I finish, I simply turn back to page one and start all over again to see what I've missed, to experience it again, more deeply, or because I don't want to let it go.

I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life.

In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

I rejected the traditional notion of 'women's work,' but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.