Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.

I know how to write fiction well.

We are often unaware of how much we love the people around us. This is true for everyone. We may think that we love certain people, but we don't know how profoundly we love them.

I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.