India, Aug. 29 -- 1The title Helen of Nowhere is wonderfully paradoxical. What does "nowhere" mean? This book is about finding a place, learning to know a place, and being rooted close to the land. Helen is a messenger of sorts, or a guide, from a place that seems grounded but is in fact a conceptual space. This "nowhere" can be anything. The Man thinks he is looking for one specific place to call home, but it's the nowhere in himself he must attend to. There are many possible meanings, though, which is the fun of it. 2The novel is interested in the relationship between love and power. Can love ever be separated from unequal structures of power? I think so. I think love is about finding a place of true relating, where we can face ourselves and each other with kindness, with honesty, and with vulnerability. 3There are moments when the book seems to move from novel into fable, myth and allegory. Do you think contemporary fiction has become too cautious about crossing such boundaries? We are in a very commercial moment, in publishing, at least in the US; which has to do with a lot of things. But I don't think it means writers are experimenting less. I just think those writers are not spotlit as readily. 4What philosophical questions were you thinking about most intensely while writing the novel? I have been reading the zen poetry of (the 18th-century Japanese monk) Ryokan, and that is unusually philosophical for its size. I don't know why philosophy has to be synonymous with big, though. It seems to me these are simple questions that has been asked over and over again since the dawn of time, really. What does it mean to live a good life? How do we love? What is justice? How do we forgive 5 Is marriage, in the book, meant to imply the political institution and the emotional one? I wasn't really thinking of marriage as a political institution, any more than I was thinking of it as a structure with its own rules and obligations. I was thinking of it as one possible socially accepted framing device to contain and make sense of love, I guess. 6Which books accompanied you while you were writing Helen of Nowhere? I always come back to the Greek myths, old fables, stories that have been told and retold for centuries and since ancient times. I am fascinated by how these stories are carried with us. I think of it as a conversation across time. With each book, I turn back to these stories as a foundation, and ask myself: How am I still learning from this? In this new phase of life, how has my interpretation changed?...