“

We had to keep pushing through, to deliver this book so that other people could do the same, this end product and getting the story down on the page could help other readers and people do the same things we were doing, in a way our characters really became a proxy for us on the page, they are having trouble figuring out how to talk about race. And there's a lot of misunderstandings and apprehensions and fears and even blind spots. And those were, I mean, not identical because the circumstances were different between Jo and I in real life and our characters, but the overall dynamic was [ similar. ].