No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.

There's this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman - and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.

Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.

I can remember when there were storylines with gay characters on shows like 'Family' and 'Dynasty' and thinking, I have something in common with that person. This was way before the Internet and all the visibility that has brought with it.