Oh, definitely and I talk about all the things that I really needed to make me happy at that point in time were outside of Mississippi, and now all the things that I need to make me happy are back there.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.
I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?
I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.
I'm from the Mississippi delta originally.
I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California.
I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time.
I'm happy - despite things that might have happened in my life.
I don't really talk too much about my personal life, but I'm happy.
Anytime I was in Memphis with my dad and at the house, I was happy. That was, like, a given. It was what I lived for. And I still feel the same excitement and warmth.