feeling-unmoored asked:
Hi unpaid social media intern, when writing TFIOS did you slip in a Terminator reference? The internet is not giving me any answers, so I'm hoping you will know!
Thank you (and btw, I love your coffee!)
- I don’t know. Maybe? Can you remind me of the passage? I spent ten years writing that book off and on, and so there was plenty of time for insertion of references and resonances of all sorts. But that was over a decade ago. When I started writing tfios, I was 23. When I finished it, I was 33. Now, I am 45. A roaring sea of time has passed between me and that book, and so I do not remember too much about it.
- In some ways, the person who wrote that book is so strange to me. He was so angry, so grief-stricken, so furiously unreconciled to a world where injustice is twisted into God’s Plan or the Universe’s Will or whatever. I remember that person, and I care for him, and I am still unreconciled to this world, but for me writing the book was a way of saying what I needed to tell myself: It is not only long lives that can be full lives, and not only old love that can be real love.
- I am still very angry about injustice. But at this juncture in my life, my focus is on the injustice that we as a human community are choosing and causing. We are choosing and causing a world where 1 in 20 Sierra Leonean women can expect to die in pregnancy or childbirth. We are choosing and causing a world where 1,500,000 people die every year of tuberculosis, a disease that is seen as a past-tense phenomenon in most of the rich world. I do not know how to write books about this horror, at least not yet, but it is the focus of my life right now and the reason I have become, for instance, an unpaid intern of a coffee company that donates its profits toward rectifying the horrific injustice of the global maternal mortality crisis.


