Nemeses aren't born. They are made.
I've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.
Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.
Books are often far more than just books.
Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters.
Violence is a common part of far too many women's lives.
I write toward both idealism and reality - how things are and how I wish they could be.
Oftentimes, when a woman demands accountability, respect, or consideration, she is crazy or nagging or whatever.
I am trying to keep growing and improving as a writer.
I probably write the same story a hundred different ways. I suppose right now I am looking for the 101st different way to write that same story. And the 102nd, and 103rd and 111th and 133rd.
I don't want the success to go away. I don't want it to seem unearned.
I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.
I read constantly because there is so much to learn from the writing in the world.
I look at my older writing to see where my weaknesses are and then I try to address those weaknesses and make new mistakes.
Good fiction challenges us as much as it entertains and these days, we could do with both of these things.
I like what the internet offers: the ability to get people interested in your mind, and have a chance if you're not conventionally attractive.
The idea of life in France is a utopia where the women are beautiful and they eat cheese all day and wear designer clothes and are magically thin and more evolved. And that's wonderful. Over here, we're still fighting for birth control.
Knowing that a story needs to be told is a great motivator, even if telling a given story comes at a price. Writing Hunger has been the most difficult writing of my life, and it's the rawest and perhaps most necessary. We'll see how people take it. I always strive to write beyond personal catharsis because though I write first and foremost for myself, I do recognize that I need to look outward as much if not more than I look inward, so the reader has something with which they can engage.
I would like to believe that most people, regardless of gender, are good and kind. The good men in my stories are the rule. It's the bad men that are the exception and because I tend toward the dark in my fiction, you see more of the exception than the rule.
Generally, the ways we discuss the fat body pathologize it; we treat it as a medical problem and/or a social problem that must be solved. "Morbid obesity" is in many ways saying we are the walking dead. Or walking to our death. And that is no way to live, with that sort of moniker hanging over your head at all times. I think it forces fat people to internalize a lot of unnecessary self-loathing.
My dream was to write a book and see it published. I didn't dare imagine anything beyond that, so, I'm trying to keep my head on my shoulders.
Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.
The actual act of writing brings me such pleasure - to tell stories, to engage in cultural criticism, to reflect, to question, all of it is invigorating.
The designation is useful and necessary and sometimes limiting but it is only limiting to people who think, for example, that African-American literature couldn't possibly be something they could be interested in or relate to. They have limited imaginations, which is sad.
And all the women are feminine, so we never get to see masculine presenting women and we never get to frame that as beautiful, which it is, and that's incredibly frustrating, so for every gain or benefit that the internet offers there is a liability.
