Q: Let’s get back for a moment to the connections between this story and your own experiences. Aren’t there certain parallels—for example, between your own strong, secretive mother and Ruth? Or Raj’s absent father and your own?

NM: Ruth is certainly strong and secretive, but her character is very different from that of my mother, who is extremely gregarious and charming. Raj’s father is absent, but is still alive, and ultimately comes to be somewhat malevolently present in his absence.

But to say that this world is utterly disconnected from my own experience would be false. Any fiction is, to some extent, an imaginative recasting of the author’s experience.

Of course I was not brought up in a small town in Missouri during the 1950s; my childhood landscape was urban London. However, I did grow up in a huge apartment block full of poor immigrant families—Irish, Spanish, Indian, Greek, West Indian, Italian, Middle Eastern. In many ways, this was just like a small town (or like the world of the small town I create in Pisgah), a self-contained community, slightly incestuous and porous, with the dozens of children who played together leaking to one another, in their naïve ways, the secrets of their families.

We were in and out of each other’s homes, seeing, hearing, and learning much more of the mysteries of adult life than any of those adults could ever imagine. Though I didn’t have a father, I didn’t envy any child his or her father in that place: These men, often oppressive, violent, or simply absurd, took the air out of their homes. We also lived near Richmond Park, a huge city park where you could almost imagine yourself in the countryside. This was both a place of fear, since we were beaten up by older boys a number of times, but also of freedom and beauty where we spent our summers climbing trees, jumping ditches, and running through herds of deer.

There’s no doubt that you can see much of this reconstituted in the novel. But to make such comparisons can also too narrowly define a work of fiction, which should be a world of its own, as new and compelling for the writer as it is for the reader.

Q: Is this a coming-of-age novel?

NM: In some ways, sure, at least as far as Annie and Raj are concerned. But what exactly does “coming of age” mean? Most of the adults in the novel, such as Ruth, are struggling just as profoundly to “become” something. These children are born into a world where there is no clear example of what to be or how to get there, but this crisis afflicts everyone except those who have become less than human.