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Q: How did life change for you after the publication of Caucasia?

A: It was really, you know, my greatest dream, and it became much more popular than I would have ever envisioned for this book; this was my graduate-school thesis. And I think I wasn’t quite prepared for that. It really stopped me from writing for two years after the book came out. I didn’t write, I just sort of had to live the book in a way, and be on this perpetual publicity tour for it, and I think it took me a while to recover from that, and from being this author but not a writer, and to kind of learn to reclaim that private space, and that intimate space of writing that has nothing to do with the publicity you do for the book later. But I had to learn a lot of that the hard way: getting writer’s block, feeling a lot of pressure on me, and a lot of expectation.

I’ve learned a lot from other, older writers in the last five years, you know, just people who have written for 25, 30 years, friends of mine, who have given me a lot of perspective, kind of realizing that, first of all, you need to develop filters; you don’t read everything that’s written about your work, you don’t take in every response to it. It’s sort of like you let go of the book, and it has a life of its own after you’ve written it, and you can’t control that life. I think for me, that was the thing with Caucasia: I wasn’t able to just write it and then move on, because it became this big success, so I had to kind of live in it for a long time. I don’t think I would ever do that again with a book. And then, you know, there’s the whole thing of becoming like a spokesperson for racial identity, which I found very uncomfortable as a novelist.

Q: But how do you avoid it?

A: Yeah. I mean, I feel like this book, for instance — I think that it might be a little bit more controversial in terms of the racial politics of it, because I’m playing with some of the stereotypes around mixed-race people. One of the compliments of Caucasia was that it defied the "tragic mulatto," and in this book, I feel like I’m kind of playing with that stereotype a lot. One of the things I said at a reading the other night, which just sort of came to me on the spot, was that I felt like Caucasia kind of chose me; as a book, the subject kind of chose me. And I didn’t feel, after that book, like a real artist, because I hadn’t had to do the work of choosing a book that was sort of outside of me. And this book feels much more like I became a writer in the process of writing it.

Q: Did it feel harder to write?

A: The actual writing of it was really fun, but the emotional pressures around it were much harder. Because I wrote Caucasia in grad school and nobody was expecting anything from me. So I would say that the writing itself wasn’t harder, but the circumstances under which I wrote it were really difficult. I had heard about second-book syndrome, and I didn’t really believe it until I went through it. It was hard. It was a big challenge to write past that big successful debut novel, and to kind of survive that experience. I think you learn throughout your life how to survive disappointments, but you don’t often learn how to survive something like that. And you don’t know that you have to survive it, that there’s even going to be a problem.

Q: I would imagine that no matter how many times you tell yourself it doesn’t matter what people say about the second book, it is going to matter.

A: Well, yeah. I mean, I think for a long time, at least, I felt that way. But [now] I feel like I’m not really reading stuff about it; I’m working on another book now and I’m really excited about that, and I think I’m much more able to kind of let it go than I was with the first one, and feel like it’s going to have a life now that’s outside of me. Of course you want good reviews and you want that stuff, but I think I’m less attached to that than I was with the first book. I’ve gotten out of this book what I needed to get out of it.

Q: It’s been six years since Caucasia. Aside from writing Symptomatic, what else have you been up to?

A: I’ve been a teacher of creative writing at Holy Cross, and I was at Sarah Lawrence for a couple of years. I’ve been writing shorter pieces; I’ve published essays and written a couple of film things, a script. And I think mostly just kind of finding myself again. I don’t think I knew who I was when Caucasia came out, and that experience didn’t help that process. It was extremely confusing. So I think these past five years have been a process of rediscovering who I am and what my voice is, and all of that stuff, but working full-time at the same time. It’s been very intense. The process of moving past Caucasia has been interesting.

Q: How did growing up in Boston influence your writing?

A: One of the things I’m always fascinated with when I leave the East Coast, especially, is the lack of a sense of history. I think having grown up in Boston, I’m really aware of how we’re always living in the present and in the past, and how our present is informed by our past. I grew up in an extremely racially fraught moment in Boston, and that has been — I think a lot of my inspiration for writing has come out of that sense of America, and this obsession that we have with race, and how much each of us is not just an individual, but is made up of these other social forces. And I think Boston being as intensely stratified as it is has given me a really strong sense of the way that class and race and gender all influence us, whether we like to acknowledge it or not.