Q: Do you think it's less autobiographical than most first novels?

A: Well, yes, I think it's less, because I've been writing for a while now, publishing, and I got that autobiographical impulse out of me. I'm not interested in writing of my coming of age or something.

I also think Virginia is in some senses a little more reserved than I am and a little more cautious. Her family background is certainly different from mine because my childhood with my family was very warm and talkative, but I wanted to see what she would do if she were put into those situations.

Q: Some of those situations are quite touchy.

A: I realize they are touchy issues, and my feeling was that I wanted to present Virginia as a particular individual with her own hangups, her own problems and her own good points as well. It takes place in the '70s when people were not quite as informed. One of the things I felt was that I did not have to feel PC.

It's a similar thing in the beginning of the novel where there's this whole thing with the sambo doll and then the black doll that she doesn't want. It isn't that she doesn't want the black doll; it's that she wanted a doll with hair. So what if it was black--it just wasn't physically well-made. That's what she's reacting to. Of course it's misinterpreted as that carte blanche idea that she's ashamed of being black.

Q: Why did you choose to set it at that time, in the seventies?

A: I felt it was a time that hadn't been dealt with very much. I was really interested in the mid-seventies, right after the sixties, at the brink of Watergate and before yuppie time, when the entire country had kind of gone to sleep.

I think the people that came of age were old enough to witness the '60s but were also never easily turned into yuppies. There's this profound sense of unease that makes us want to sweep it under the rug.

Q: Where do you feel like you come from?

A: That's a good way of phrasing it. I do feel like I come from the Midwest. I mean I feel like that is my spiritual home although I've traveled all over. I was born in Akron, Ohio and that's where my parents are to this day and that's where my siblings are, so it is a kind of place to go home to.

I was raised with a second generation middle class background because both my parents came from working families and my father was the first black chemist in the rubber industry. We grew up as middle class but always with that sense of 'well you've got to save,' which came from that borderline where you're always rubbing up against two classes and things like that.

Q: Did you always want to be a writer or did you ever want to be a puppeteer, or something else in theater?

A: No, I've never had anything to do with theater, puppetry or anything like that. I wrote when I was young. I didn't think of it in terms of being a writer and I was a reader before I was a writer. I devoured books; I read anything I could get my hands on.

The poem I actually first remember I wrote when I was about ten. It's one of those rhyming things but it was fun. It was one of those Easter poems, about a rabbit who had one droopy ear and how he solves his problem. It was a narrative poem, you know.