That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters. - Patricia Grace

("have you ever thought of yourself as a member of a corpus of post-colonial writers?") I try to keep away from that sort of vocabulary and theorising. I'm aware of my work being classified, but don't want to be influenced in any way by those classifications — or by reviews or analyses. I need to keep myself as free as I can from commentary. I have to judge my own work for myself, do things my own way, make my own choices and decisions. I must own what I do. Once a work has been published it's been given. It's gone.

I grew up amid two worlds, having close, continuous and frequent contact with each. These were two different and contrasting spheres that I inhabited, both full of life and vitality: my mother's Pākehā family and my father's Māori whānau. (chapter 2 p18)

Only [he] could secure me, he being as rooted to the earth as a tree is. Only he could free me from raging forever between earth and sky - which is a predicament of great loneliness and loss. (Roimata, chapter 3 p23)