I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."
I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.
If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.
All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.
