"The Iliad. I remember feeling electrified by that. In a way that I just wanted to talk about it. I carried that text with me everywhere, and it's become such a big influence in how I think of writing. (NANCY: Was it the war story or the relationships?) MM: The war. I still o back to the way Homer depicts the battles, and I remember sitting there glued to this and feeling my heart race, and it felt like a light bulb was going on in my head. I think what Homer was doing with that, what felt so electrifying, was he was naming every single person, and he was calling out their history and who they were, whose child, what they were good at-like describing Hector as "Breaker of Horses.". I thought, This is how we need to think of conflict, and it brought to mind all the questions I had about the revolution in Ethiopia and the people who kept disappearing; or people knew who were jailed and nobody wanted to talk about them or name them. But here was a text that was actually naming them, and it was pivotal for me in understanding what literature could do."