She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones. - Maaza Mengiste

Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy.

What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.

I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed.