So, yes, it is very hard work, and there are days where there’s something I have to do in the book, something I have to learn or put myself and the characters through that I am… That makes me fearful or sorrowful. But I do think also that this aspect of writing is over reported at the expense of the pleasurable aspect as well. If writers didn’t love to be in this space between themselves and their language, they probably wouldn’t do it. You’d give up.

As for motivation, I'd say it's a combo of 50s Puritan work ethic and finish-it-itis -- I hate not finishing things.

Well, this meant 16 months' time to do all the work for a doctor in zoology, including writing a thesis, and it meant working 16 or 17 hours every day and no such things as Saturdays or Sundays or vacations or going to the movies or going out with girls. I just... it was a total grind for 16 months. But I made it;

Carrie helped me keep to a strict rhythm, but all the essays took shape in very idiosyncratic ways.

I don’t think I could. Of course I’m saying this on American soil. I’m facing a few more months of work in this city, but at the end of it, I will be returning to South Africa. I would like to believe that if for some reason the situation deteriorated to the point where I was told, “If you leave South Africa, you can never come back,” I’d stay there. There were periods in my life when I could have been seduced away. I am incredibly fortunate that the government took away my passport at the point when I was most open to seduction. With my passport gone, I could have left on a one-way ticket. But the issue was so starkly highlighted that I had no problem in saying, “No.”

That is true. That one little corner of South Africa, Port Elizabeth and its immediate surroundings, is a region that I know like the back of the hand that holds my pen as I write about it. I can stand on a street corner in Port Elizabeth, look at anybody and put together some sort of biography. I know where they come from, where they’re going. I have a feel of the textures of their life. If I stand on a street corner in New Haven, which is a place I’ve gotten to know as well as any place outside of South Africa, I am still at a total loss to identify the people passing me on that street.