I certainly write about what I know, but I write a lot about my fears, my worries, my concerns, my worst nightmare. I try to write about experiences that are foreign to me: What might it be like to lose a parent or a child? What might it be like to immigrate? Certainly the novel is very much a collage of things I have gone through and have never gone through. But I can’t possibly think of a reader as I am writing because so much of the process to me is answering a question.
