Q: You write about Paris in such detail—we even get some advice on how to navigate a notoriously congested area: “The trick at the Arc de Triumphe is to stay in the outer ring of cars around the first half and then veer off quickly—as if shot from a cannon—over to the wide start of Victor Hugo.” How did you come to know the city so well?

A: Well I wrote my memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune, about the years I lived in Beijing, China, during the Olympics. In that book I decided to map Beijing really closely, almost obsessively, so that the city came very alive on the page. I'm completely interested in place and in locale in any narrative I encounter. I think place does an enormous amount of work to both contextualize and propel any story forward.

In Paris Was the Place I took my love of Paris and my minor in French in college and my experiences in the city (my junior year of college I lived very close to Avenue Victor Hugo for a time, and I've taken other trips to Paris as an adult) and tried to weave that all into the story so that the reader really believes he or she is in Paris. I also read a whole lot of other novels set in France.

My craziest Francophile moment came when I found myself making these gigantic maps of the Paris neighborhoods covered in my novel. I used indelible markers on poster board in my little rabbit warren of an office on the third floor of our old house, and I tried to recreate the streets that Willie and Macon walked on in Paris. These hand-scrawled maps were my blue print of the city. They're almost illegible but they gave me access to the parts of the city I really had to make sure the novel rendered fully. I needed to make the maps to feel like I was there in Paris. Then I knew that the reader would (hopefully!) feel like they were there too.

Q: Tell us a bit about one of the book's central issues: immigrant girls who have requested French asylum. What process must they go through, and what flaws are inherent to the system?

A: Immigration rights are buzz words these days. In the U.S. the media and the government are covering the unfolding new immigration bill in a relentless twenty-four news cycle. But what gets lost are the personal stories of youth immigrants—teens and pre-adolescents who make border crossings alone at night only to be caught up in an even bigger trauma, which is the judicial system.

I wanted to look hard at the stories of these immigrant teens. In my book, they are girls who arrive in France. But they could be boys or girls from any country, arriving unwanted in any nation. The teens' journeys of escape from their home countries come at great expense. The media is now beginning to really talk about the human costs of incarcerating and deporting refugee teenagers and the great injustice being done to these kids. The biggest flaw that I see in asylum proceedings is that the cards are stacked against the refugee. Often the refugee never even makes it to a court of law where they can be heard. Instead their case is dismissed summarily on lack of evidence. But so often there's no evidence because the detainee can't speak the proper home language of the country they've been locked up inside, or they haven't been given any storytelling tools and have never gone to school.

Rajiv, a good friend of the narrator's, is an advisor to the asylum center in the novel and he's fed up with the system. He finally starts to lose it during a scene in an Indian restaurant and yells, “No one knows what to do with teenage girls who can't go back to their home countries but don't have French passports…the French government says that every child in France is redeemable, even the ones who come illegally. But then they lock them up.”

Q: Why is it so important for these girls to learn to tell their stories? What compelled you to write about them?

A: Stories are what give us all a compass. They give us what I like to call emotional literacy. Stories are central to our life experience. I think we live our days in an endless loop of storytelling. We tell stories to ourselves, to our kids, and to friends and strangers. Stories are about the power of language to communicate some essential truths that we know about ourselves and our world.

In the novel, stories are essential to the girls at the asylum center. The storywriting itself helps keep the girls sane. It allows them a small departure from their locked up lives. They get to travel back in time. The stories are also key pieces in the machinations of the French justice system. When they tell their stories in court, the girls may be granted their freedom.

I was compelled to write about these girls when I began working with refugee teens and realized that so often the kids didn't have access to their own stories. No one had ever said to them, “your story matters. I hear you. I see you. Let's get something down on the page.” And the power of that—of getting to tell your own story—cannot be underestimated. I have seen it change so many lives. In the novel, the girls at the asylum center have to be able to tell the court where they've come from and what happened to them in their home countries that forced them to flee. If they can't tell their own stories, then they have no chance of being allowed to stay in France.

Q: What made you choose to set the novel in 1980s?

A: If the memoirist's job is to make real life read as cinematically as a novel, then perhaps a novelist's job is to take the craziness and drama of real life and spin it into something entirely fictive. I had a dear friend named Keith Taylor who died of AIDS in the 90's. He was like family to my husband and me. He contracted AIDS in the 1980's when so little was known about the virus.

Keith found out about his diagnosis in 1989, right around the time that Luke does in my novel. I wanted to try to capture some part of the great unknowingness that lived around the disease back then. It may seem obvious to some readers that Luke has AIDS early on. But the power of denial is incredibly strong for some people. Even when it would have seemed logical that my friend Keith had AIDS, none of us, including him, were willing to admit that for quite a while. There was so much we didn't know. And so much false hope about AZT. This was another facet of the AIDS crisis that I wanted to try to portray—how in the face of death we attach hope to new medicines and how those medicines can let us down terribly.

Q: Willie travels to India to research the poet Sarojini Naidu. Why is Willie interested in her, of all poets?

A: Willie has a habit of finding strong women poets in foreign countries (her first book of criticism was on a fairly well known modernist French poet, Anne-Marie Albiach) and deconstructing their work for a Western and American audience. Sarojini Naidu compels Willie because Sarojini is a fighter. A feminist. An ally of Gandhi's. A subversive who wrote the most unassuming seeming poems, which turned out to be calls for the education of the Indian woman. Calls for independence from England. The more I learned about Sarojini's life, the more fascinated I knew that Willie would become with her.

Q: There are many forgiving, generous, loyal characters in this book. Who inspired your characters? Do you see yourself in any of them?

A: As much as any character can be inspired by a real-life person, Luke Pears was inspired by my friend, Keith Taylor. And there are threads of my life—teaching storytelling to refugee kids, leading poetry workshops in a youth prison, living in Paris and traveling through India, that are all woven into Willie's life. But she is not me. It was a great relief when I realized that this novel wasn't an autobiographical one in any true sense of the word.

The novel really took hold for me when Willie began to screw up and do things that I never would have done after I set her loose in Paris. She's forgiving in the end and so is her father and so is Macon. But that comes at a price, so the forgiveness is hard-earned. As I get older I see how so much of life is about this notion of forgiveness and acceptance. This need to just get over certain transgressions and move on.

We had this great refrain in a writing workshop I taught last summer up here in Maine at the Stonecoast Writers Conference. It went like this: “writing is hard and it takes a lot of time.” You're supposed to say this refrain with a straight face, while implying lots of irony. And we said it every day in that workshop.

So because writing is hard and take a long time, I didn't want to write a novel about mean, vindictive people. I just thought it would be much more pleasant to spend time in the heads of people who were trying to do right—people who were loyal in the end and generous. And I already had to try to capture a heart wrenching death scene in my novel. That was enough disappointment in one novel for me. I chose to believe that even my most wobbly characters could do the right thing to some degree when pressed. And I'm not all pollyanna about life. But I do believe that when really tested, most people will prevail and that their goodness will get them through.

--from B&N