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On the fun of writing a book that didn't require research

"I wrote so much of this book so quickly because I didn't really have that inhibition that I always had with the previous books. You know, my first book is about the Korean War. I always, writing those previous books, was worried that I would make some kind of mistake. Not an artistic mistake, but just a mistake, you know, write the wrong stuff. With this book it was a lot easier to just kind of look to my gut and think, 'Would she do it? Yeah, she would.'

"So I kind of wrote most of the first draft in this sort of, like, headlong rush — which is, in a lot of ways, the way Regina goes barreling through this series of events in her life, kind of obeying her appetites and her instincts, which often lead her way wrong and then, you know, finding herself — oh, my God — in situations that she didn't really anticipate.

"That happened to me when I was writing it. I didn't plan out everything that would happen, you know? It was fun."

On youth and the nature of sexuality and sexual identity

"There's a passage in the book in which kind of her older self reflects on it and says, 'We didn't really think about the fact that we were two women.' She says that that wasn't ever a primary thought, I think because there weren't a lot of thoughts. And I really wanted to bring that alive. Her lover — who's older, who's actually in a marriage — is sort of the one who's like, 'We just can't do this the way you think we can do it.'

"Regina's very young, she thinks like, 'What? What? What's wrong? We love each other. Well, why should we have to think about anything else?' And I wanted to capture both the intensity of that — thinking there's no obstacles — and her older self looking back and kind of marveling that she could ever feel that way."

More On Susan Choi

Book Tour

Susan Choi Draws 'Interest' from Headlines

Embassy Row — otherwise known as Massachusetts Avenue — in Washington, D.C., is decorated with flags of every nation, flying in front of impressive embassy buildings.

In front of the embassies, there are often statues of national heroes. Winston Churchill graces the grounds of the British Embassy. Outside the Indian Embassy, Mahatma Gandhi looks as though he's in full stride, clad in loincloth and sandals.

And now, there's a Hindu goddess. Saraswati just arrived. She stands in a garden in front of Indonesia's embassy, glowing white and gold, with her four arms upraised.

Indonesian Ambassador Dino Patti Djalal says the goal was to stand out from the other embassies.

"I think this is exactly what we wanted to do with Massachusetts Avenue," he says, "add something that would jazz it up."

Saraswati is the goddess of learning and wisdom, Djalal says. At her feet are three children studying. It was crafted by three Balinese sculptors in three weeks.

Her expression is beatific. "This would be the same expression that you would see in Hindu goddesses throughout Bali," Djalal says. "A face of calm ... blessing those who are seeing her."

Although Indonesia is home to the largest population of Muslims in the world, Djalal chose a symbol of the Hindu religion for the embassy in Washington.

"One of the most famous, if not the most famous, islands in Indonesia is Bali," he says. "And Bali is a Hindu enclave in Muslim-majority Indonesia. And I think it says a lot about our respect for religious freedom that the statue in front of the country with the largest Muslim population is a Hindu statue."

All this week, NPR is taking a look at the demographic changes that could reshape the political landscape in Texas over the next decade — and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

To see the speed of demographic change in Texas, look no further than its largest city — Houston. Only 40 percent of the city's population is non-Hispanic white, and by a Rice University count, it's the most racially and ethnically diverse city in America.

"Houston is an immigrant magnet," says Glenda Joe, a Chinese-Texan community organizer whose extended family came to Houston in the 1880s.

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Sometimes pictures do a better job of conveying what's going on in the world. Here are three images — two from Sunday and one from Saturday — that describe the nature of protests in Egypt, Brazil and Turkey.

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