Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.