Issue #39

I am really interested in family and how families work. And how we love and don't love, and that sort of thing. Really, I wanted to show war as a time in which people come together, not just a time people die. My brother was born during the war. And often I think about how my parents had a really difficult time, and lost everything they owned. But still my brother was born.—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, interviewed by Robert Birnbaum

That's what the story was really about all along: it's her struggle to maintain faith in her vocation. It's not about her struggle to maintain faith in God—that's not an issue. It's her faith in her vocation, that she's doing the right thing. And that's exactly what I was going through, struggling to maintain faith in my chosen vocation, writing.—Mark Salzman, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies

I said, "Are you going to sell these letters? Don’t you want to read them?" And they said, "Unh-unh." So, I bought them. I just thought it was horrible that nobody would read them after she had saved them her whole life. I went home and read them, and while none of them was particularly literary, the thing that struck me was this incredible sense of fullness and wholeness of that woman's life, and her sister's lives. And there was my answer: that maybe letters would be a good way to cover a huge span of time.—Lee Smith, interviewed by Susan McInnis

Just making all the parts of a novel come together and end at the same time is insanely difficult, or you get stuck and something that must go with something else just can't. Or you have the problem of the baby and the weather. Pregnancy takes nine months, and children walk and talk months later. And it snows only in winter—but suddenly you may find yourself with a plot that depends on a baby being conceived in a snowstorm, born on the Fourth of July, and commenting on the next snowstorm. In life, those things take care of themselves.—Alice Mattison, interviewed by Barbara Brooks