I feel like in the reading I did when I was growing up, and also in the way that people talk and tell stories here in the South, they use a lot of figurative language. The stories that I heard when I was growing up, and the stories that I read, taught me to use the kind of language that I do. It's hard for me to work against that when I am writing.

One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that's more expected.

The UnAmericans' is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut - and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

Conservatives are, I think, correct to highlight family stability as a fundamental issue that goes to the welfare of children as much as food stamps or anything else.

Every day we do get closer to a cure. Three out of four children who are diagnosed with cancer will survive the disease, but that is not good enough. The loss of one child to this disease is too much.

I understood from a very young age that school was important and that my parents were making great sacrifices for me. Every morning I saw my father get up and go to a job that he didn't really like. They came to France for the same reasons all immigrants move to another country - so their kids could have a better way of life.