One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.