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Ann Marlowe writes about archeology, sex, economics, and military affairs and is a long-published authority on Afghanistan. Her first book is about how she basically liked being addicted to heroin. She is a Harvard classics dropout, a Columbia MBA, and a West Villager with a killer New York accent. Is this enough? Ever on the move, she was interviewed in a variety of places; she answered questions from her home in the WV, another home in the Hamptons, on her laptop in an Afghani internet café. One answer she BlackBerried.

Your last book was about romance and love and sex with a younger Afghani guy but when it came out you had been reporting for the Post and Times and National Review. Can you put these things together for us?

OK. Let's just get this out of the way: Why heroin?

Heroin provided a feeling that all is right with the world, together with an apparent lucidity. That's why it is such a seductive drug. It doesn't feel evil or dangerous. I wish I had stopped using it after a year or two, I had certainly learned most of what I learned by then. But it is far from my major regret in life.

What's the deal with you and Afghanistan?

What attracted me to Afghanistan was how one person can make a difference there. Another way of describing this is insularity. It also has a fantastic ruins and pre-Islamic and Islamic sites unrestored and unvisited by Westerners. The landscape is not always pretty but it is usually dramatic.

Some of our exchange here is I think going to be written in an Afghani internet café. What is it like in an Afghani internet café?

An internet café here is pretty grimy, filled with young Afghan men doing everything to playing video games, looking at porn, writing to family oversees and bidding on construction contracts with the American Army; maybe ten to twenty computers. There is no food or drink. The "café" is metaphorical, like European cafes. Foreigners are pretty common in Kabul but in Mazar I definitely get some looks. Not hostile-after all people using the internet are quite westernized in aspirations, but foreigners are less common outside Kabul.

Why do you believe one person make a difference?

One person can make a difference in a country where there just aren't very many educated people, still fewer with any initiative. I like to think I make a difference in my reporting, and I also raised money-half mine, the rest a very generous friend, Alan Gibbs, and two of my cousins-to rebuild the library at Afghanistan's first private university, the American University of Afghanistan. The library is named after my mother, I think she would appreciate it and smile wryly, a long way from home for a woman whose first language was Yiddish.

We hear a lot about the poor treatment of women in Afghanistan. What have you seen that contradicts or confirms the general US consensus?

There's a lot of hysteria about the treatment of women in Afghanistan. The situation is both better and worse than you think. Better, because most families are close and warm, and many people marry their first cousins, so they are not likely to have such a bad time. Unlike our society, there's no stigma attached to women having a profession, and it's easy to combine this with child rearing because everyone lives in huge extended families.  Worse, because restrictions on women are internalized. It's the "what would people think" mentality that is keeping women from civic participation as much as any threat of violence.

You just returned from Afghanistan. What did you do?

This time I went to Kabul and Mazar -i-Sharif, where I have been about ten times before; I also went to Herat for the second time. It was hotter than hell, and afflicted by the "wind of 120 days" which blows all summer. Definitely not the right time, in fact I would never go to Afghanistan in August by choice, but hey, that's when they had their elections. I wrote two articles about the elections and democracy, one about the economy, and I have a couple more in the works. The bright spot in Herat was seeing the amazing work the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has done in the Old City, renovating private and public buildings.

In your memoir you wrote that there is no postal service in Afghanistan, and so correspondence depends on friends who are traveling, which is just so beautiful. As a writer, what was your experience with the mail?

Never used the post.  I use email for most of my work, though some Afghans even Afghan officials still don't "do" email and have to be called.  There's wi-fi all over Kabul and internet cafes all over Afghanistan by now. The mobile phone network sometimes seems to me more far reaching than in the US - there's better coverage in rural Khost province than in the Hamptons.

I just still love that idea that letters depend on travelers passing them to other travelers.

. . .

What do you like to do in the Hamptons?

I like the water-swimming, paddle boarding, kayaking, and surfing very poorly. I've been going to the Hamptons for more than 20 years now, so of course I morn the increased traffic and decreased charm and innocence, but that is true everywhere in the Western world.

Can you talk a bit about being a Westerner, growing up in PA and NJ, then becoming so interested in the Middle East? You first visited Afghanistan in college, right?

I didn't visit in college. In the summer of 1978 I wanted to take the Magic Bus from Turkey-the Magic Bus was a cheap charter bus that ran between Istanbul and India back in the 70s into the 80s when you could still cross Iran. But my boyfriend at the time pointed out rather wisely that we scarcely had money to get there and might be marooned if anything went wrong.  I always loved Islamic architecture and art and that has been a big pull to that region of the world. I've read a fair amount about Central Asian art over the years.  My first trip to the area, in 1999, when I visited Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, left me with a longing for the forbidden territory of Afghanistan.

The little I've read about Uzbekistan (Chasing the Sea) is unflattering...

I wasn't charmed by Uzbekistan. It's sort of the worst of both worlds: over-restored architecture, huge farms, and industrial pollution, but not an open society or one with a particularly stimulating civic life, at least to me. That said, Toshkent is a leafy green city with some appeal and there is surprisingly good opera!

Tell us about life in the WV.

I wasn't keen on moving to the West Village, just out of the East Village. I'd aged out of youth culture by 1999. I have not found a sense of community in the West Village, but I wasn't looking for it either. I fell in love with my house and bought it for its light and outdoors access and that was that. Now I'm happy in the West Village, with a lot of other faux bohemians!

There is much talk about your get-togethers. What can you tell us? How do I get invited?

I have people over pretty often, sometimes weekly, usually 10-20, with parties of fifty or sixty every four to six weeks. I do it because I love parties, I have a short attention span and enjoy talking with many people and meeting new people. I usually serve wine and drinks and lots of good cheese, and takeout chicken biryani from the excellent Sangam on Bleecker Street. When President Saakashvili of Georgia was at my house for a presidential debate night, he loved the biryani. I've upgraded the music in the last couple of years - a techy friend, Alex Eaton, made me a hard drive with 64,000 songs, including most of the CDs I acquired during my rock critic years. So I have a party playlist that's not too archaic now.

What are some favorite neighborhood spots? Answer this any way you want.

Sant Ambroes for coffee and brioche and dinner Blue Ribbon bakery for steak tartare. Blue Ribbon wine bar for wine and snacks. I'm not a café person and I entertain at home quite a lot so I don't go out as often as I might.

Written by Cole Louison