What are the tensions or conflicts in family and cultural life that interest you most?
One of the main tensions is what the characters in my novel expect of America and the mythological idea of America and what the actuality of it is. There are two sisters; one of them gets a scholarship to go to America, and she assumes that she will become the sort of bread winner savior of the family and make a lot of money, and what happens is very different. So she experiences all these family pressures and pressures from the community to succeed. Another tension that comes up in your story for us is the pressure from family to get married. That tension is in both the story and the novel. The character Sheela and the character Linno, who’s the oldest sister in my novel, both arrive at a certain age when they feel this sort of vague urge to get married. It’s a societal expectation, which is not so different from societal expectations here. In the novel, Linno struggles with the idea that marriage might be a sort of end to her life, rather than a continuation of the life she wants to
