Tony was a challenge, too, because I felt a heavy responsibility to do justice to a character outside of my race. My realization that he was a failed athlete, a baseball player who had come very close to success, made him finally click for me. I could see him through the lens of his ambitions and his disappointments as well as his race, and that helped me to write frankly about the real ways that his race affects his experiences in the world without making that his central defining characteristic.