Quotes from Bobbie Ann Mason

'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.

I read many riveting escape-and-evade accounts of airmen and of the Resistance networks organized to hide them and then send them on grueling treks across the Pyrenees to safety. But it was the people I met in France and Belgium who made the period come alive for me. They had lived it.

I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.

'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.