PG: Both of you are pretty dedicated nomads.

AW: I am a devout wanderer.

PG: And so are the heroines in your novels, searching for a safe home in the world. Alice’s Celie is raped and beaten down by men in positions of trust, and Colm’s Eilis is torn by homesickness, always longing for the place she isn’t. Is that search universal?

AW: Definitely. I sometimes think it’s having grown up as the daughter of sharecroppers. That pattern of having to move from one shack to another — after the family has been exploited for its labor. It’s in the rhythm of my being. Now, I have places here and places there. I go from one to the other. I want to feel that the planet is my home, but I know there are parts of the planet where I’m really not wanted, as Colm was saying.

CT: I had to be careful not to preach about that in the book, just tell the story. But I hope that when you see the young Lithuanian girl at the cash register in the supermarket looking really sad one day, you know it’s for good reason: She’s missing home. I hoped the book might contribute to that public debate.

PG: How much of your own lives contributed to these coming-of-age novels? Colm, you grew up in a rural village in Ireland, like your heroine. Your mother was also a widow.

CT: My father died when I was 12. The town had about 6,000 people. And over several months, a lot of them came to our house. They came every night. There was no telephone, so you never knew who was coming. Just a knock on the door. My job was to answer it and lead the people into the house. They would sit and have tea, and I’d watch like a hawk. They’d say how sorry they were at the beginning and the end, but the middle was something else — ordinary stories about things that happened in town, you know?

AW: I can see it perfectly.

CT: One night, a woman came and talked on and on about her daughter having gone to Brooklyn. I can see her to this day: her scarves and her hat. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn. And after she left, somebody said that a man in Brooklyn had fallen so in love with the daughter — “mad about her,” as my mother would have said — that he wouldn’t let her come back to Ireland unless she married him first. That’s all I knew. I had the story for 40 years. And I wrote it after a semester teaching in Austin, Tex., where I’d never felt as far away from home in my life. And when I went home, I really felt it. I thought, “I know what home is.” I found a way to tell the story because those feelings were so urgent.