"I see so many fools in this world that sometimes I could just go home and cry about what people do to themselves," declares J. California Cooper in an interview with Julie Livingston of the Bloomsbury Review. "And so my point is to say, 'Hey, wake up, wake up, look here! Think a minute, think a minute. This is your life! You got, what, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years here, and you gonna be gone.'" It is Cooper's firm belief that people should not waste what little time they have by indulging in self-destructive behavior that forms the basis of much of her writing. She gives her works a moral center, and although she creates a wide variety of characters, both admirable and pathetic, the reader always knows how Cooper herself feels about the people she describes. "Let's say that you were God," Cooper explains...