“I have been obsessed and intrigued all my life with how writers think this country through.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience of writing something that you’re very compelled to write without fully understanding it…”

“It’s a book about reality, about the fact that you don’t ever know what’s going to happen to you, and literally nothing you do can protect you. And that’s such a crazy thing to say, but it’s true. And we all know it.”

“I was observing somebody doing something beautifully and doing something with all of her heart. It wasn’t lost on me that that was a way of being an artist.”

“We are always fictions that we create for ourselves and others. So that gives you a different way of thinking: Like, what’s a better fiction?

“I wasn’t beholden to anybody. And at a certain point I was like, I’m not even beholden to myself. So who am I trying to people-please? Because nobody out here is checking for me. And that was really freeing.”

“Being the first black woman to be in the mainstream press as a cartoonist, I kind of felt like I broke down the door and then I stood in the doorway.”

“When I was writing I would remember the feeling of being in the waves, but the memory was less encoded as helplessness and fear and more the sense of: you’ve done difficult things before, you lived, you lived for a reason.”

“Creativity is, as they say, a practice. You have to learn the ways to access it and to you use it and to keep it vibrant and keep it alive.”

“I stood out like a sore thumb. Not even a sore thumb, just a brown thumb. I didn’t need to be sore. It was just that, that’s a perfectly fine thumb, but it’s a different pigment.”

“I said, I will only listen to Cara Romero when I’m commuting. It was like a game—some people play Wordle, I was playing the game with Cara Romero.”

“I have a really hard time being anything but who I am. That’s a very fortunate and very unfortunate quality about me.”

“I thought of those people who, whether I know them well or not, have offered to me another piece in this map of how to stay in relationships with other people and find a way forward, which is something I have truly missed about life.”

“In community is how we survive. That’s how Black people survive. The joy comes when we’re in community.”

“I realized no one cared and I could do what I wanted. I realized, even the people who loved me— they were not waking up in the morning worrying about my relationship to the short story. Whatever I did, it would be just for me.”

“Our bodies not going to let us be interchangeable parts on a car. That’s not how it works.”

“I didn’t develop my own instincts about what I wanted or what being good actually meant to me. I kind of reached this point where I felt like I was reaching the limits of that, and I needed to do something else, but I couldn’t figure out what.”

“I just remember thinking that I wasn’t sad that they were laughing. And that actually the best thing you could do with a piece of fiction was make somebody laugh.”

“Grief distorts your relationship to time. The past and the present and the future get muddled.”

“The stakes [in this book] are whether or not I can make this claim to an identity that extends beyond the present moment and that is historical. That I can make this claim as part of a community whose members have often been made into ghosts.”