This is fiction. Obviously.
We tell ourselves slavery is something we ended. We didn't. We outlawed it — France first and briefly, Britain with its navy and two hard centuries of trying, America at the cost of its bloodiest war — and then we went on living in a world that has more people in bondage now than it did when the slave ships were sailing. We didn't defeat it. We stopped looking at it.
So let me be clear about where I stand, because this book could be misread: I do not want slavery. Not anywhere, not for anyone, and least of all here, among the people who bled to be rid of it.
What I wanted was the question underneath it. Strip a woman of every ordinary comfort and protection, take away the choices that let the rest of us avoid ever finding out who we are — and what's left? I didn't write this to imagine a world with slavery in it. I wrote it to find out what a woman discovers about herself when she has nothing left to hide behind. That she chose the thing that strips her is what makes the question unbearable. It's also what makes it hers.