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I can remember in my early days of writing going to sort of writers' functions and parties and things like that, and I used to get very irritated because when people heard that you came from the suburbs, they had this notion that it was very un-cool to come from there.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.

I have published so many books in so many years. I can't complain about any lack of attention. But I've never been placed as a Southern writer, which I really am. So I was happy finally to be published by someone in the South.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

People have asked me about the 19th century and how I knew so much about it. And the fact is I really grew up in the 19th century, because North Carolina in the 1950s, the early years of my childhood, was exactly synchronous with North Carolina in the 1850s. And I used every scrap of knowledge that I had.

I grew up in the Deep South, where sexism, racism, and homophobia were and still are alive and well. I have early, early memories of words and actions of this type being very painful.

I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.