Ten years after her critically acclaimed debut, the author returns with The Wilderness (Mariner, Sept.), a story of five Black women and their bonds as they approach middle age.
How did this novel come to be?
I began The Wilderness in 2016, then I put it down to work on other projects and returned to it in 2019. Then I got pregnant, and there was a global pandemic. My approach had to evolve with my circumstances, and ultimately I got it done by finding time wherever I could—after my child’s bedtime, in between pumping, in coffee shops, on airplanes. The more my time was pulled away by other aspects of life, the less pressure I felt to do anything other than get these words onto the page, and to be honest with myself.
Your books are about human connections—in The Turner House it was family, with The Wilderness it’s with friends. Why is that a subject you want to explore?
Thinking about the world around us begins with thinking about the people closest to us. I am fortunate to have grown up in a large family, which made me interested at an early age in the idiosyncrasies of groups. This interest naturally extended to friend groups as I got older, particularly those friends who become chosen family. We learn so much about the characters from how they navigate their relationships.
The women in the novel assess their lives and make their choices after much soul-searching. What drove you to write about their progress over two decades?
The Wilderness is a kind of coming-into-middle-age novel, and I consider that journey, from young adult to a person navigating their 40s, to be just as full of mystery, self-discovery, and conflict as the one portrayed in a traditional bildungsroman. There are many road maps a young person might follow to come into their own as a teenager, but the paths are less clear for people leaving young adulthood, as what once felt certain begins to feel less so. I had an inkling of this, and I wrote into my own curiosities.
How did environmental and social justice issues come into play?
I write realist fiction, and that can mean including haints [a figure of Southern folklore], as there are in The Turner House, because real people believe in ghosts. The job is to think about the world as we know it to exist. If we live in the real world, then our lives are inevitably shaped by policy choices, by the quality of the water we drink, and the air we breathe. I’ve never been the sort of writer who thinks that these elements are somehow infringing on the fiction. Great writers from Tolstoy to Achebe understood that politics happen to real people, and it is our job as a writer to reflect that.
