Tayari Jones has always believed in the healing power of books. In 2023, she relied on that faith when she became critically ill while writing her new novel, Kin—a story of friendship and sisterhood set in the South during segregation. Jones began to get tremors in her hands that prevented her from writing legibly, then developed a limp and vision problems.
“I was getting sicker and sicker, but I was afraid to go to the doctor,” Jones says over Zoom from her home in Atlanta. She ended up in the hospital and was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. “My heart rate was so high I almost had a stroke,” she says. “I was going blind. I had to have radiation. It was terrible.”
When Jones’s condition began to stabilize, she returned to Kin. “I missed the characters,” she recalls. “I put an eye patch over my eye because I was seeing double. I wrote the book with the patch on my eye, looking like someone out of Pirates of the Caribbean. I’d think, I know I’m not well, but let me see what the people are up to. They were my escape.”
An Atlanta native and proud Southerner, Jones, who is a 2021 Guggenheim fellow, writes about love, friendship, identity, social issues, and fractured familial and romantic relationships. Her four previous novels include her 2002 debut, Leaving Atlanta, which is partly based on the Atlanta child murders of 1979–1981; The Untelling (2005); Silver Sparrow (2011); and An American Marriage (2018), the story of a couple whose lives are upended when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Jones’s books have sold approximately 1.3 million copies, according to her publisher, Knopf, and have been translated into 18 languages.
Jones’s transformative new novel, Kin, out in February from Knopf, centers on childhood best friends Vernice and Annie—two motherless girls, raised in the 1950s in Honeysuckle, La., whose lives take drastically different turns. Both girls have matrilineal wounds: Vernice’s mother was murdered, and Annie’s mother abandoned her. As the book unfolds, Annie runs away to Memphis to search for her mother, who casts a shadow over her life, while Vernice heads to Spelman College, where she encounters the powerful families of Atlanta’s Black elite and embarks on a journey of self-discovery. The novel—which at times echoes the works of Alice Walker and Richard Yates—is masterfully told in alternating chapters from Vernice’s and Annie’s perspectives, as they face heartbreak, racism, sexism, and loss, on their way to becoming independent Black women—but not necessarily the women they ever expected to become.
Kin was written in the upstairs study of Jones’s house in the Glenwood Park neighborhood of Atlanta, where the author, who’s a professor at Emory University, has lived since 2018. Her subdivision was once the site of a cement recycling center—which was a selling point for Jones when she moved in. “I don’t have to worry about what was destroyed for me to have the house,” she says. “Unless I’m haunted by the ghost of a brick, it’s going to be fine.” Jones’s study has curtains that were made by her mother and features nooks for her manual typewriters, on which she sometimes writes. “I enjoy old-fashioned things,” she notes. “I’m an analog person. I don’t like shortcuts.”
Jones takes time in her novels to create detail-rich settings, and it was important to her that Kin authentically reflect life in the South in the ’50s and ’60s. As part of her research, she consulted the memoir Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a civil rights figure and Spelman graduate, and flipped through old Sears, Roebuck catalogs to get a feel for the fashions of the time. She also drew inspiration from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which is partly set during the same period. “I always feel daunted by Morrison.” Jones says. “She’s done the novel, the rest of us can just go work at the post office, is how I feel.”
Jordan Pavlin, Jones’s editor, relished working with author, who sometimes sent her amusing postcards detailing her progress on Kin. Pavlin describes Jones as “prodigiously gifted”—someone who “lights up every room she enters with her energy and humor and warmth.”
Born in 1970, Jones was always the tallest kid in her class at school. Brainy and spunky, she once tried to convince her elementary school teacher that she had a twin who was in another grade. Her parents—with whom she remains close—were professors, and active in the civil rights movement.
“Growing up in Atlanta, I didn’t understand emotionally that Black people were a minority,” Jones says. “I think there’s an assumption that racism is a central question of every Black person’s life, and that Black writers are supposed to explain racism.”
At 16, Jones left home for Spelman College, where she embraced feminism and met her mentor, Pearl Cleage. After graduating in 1991 with a BA in English, she received an MA from the University of Iowa, then an MFA from Arizona State University in 2000. While at Arizona State, Jones worked on Leaving Atlanta. That book and its follow-up, The Untelling, achieved some success in the 2000s but eventually went out of print. “I was humiliated,” Jones admits. But she kept writing, and she hit the bestseller list in 2018 with An American Marriage, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was lauded by Winfrey and former president Barack Obama.
Jane Dystel, Jones’s agent, has been with the author since the start of her career and loves watching her thrive. “Tayari is one of a kind,” Dystel says. “She’s able to describe the human condition in a way that few people can.”
After An American Marriage was released, Jones worried she’d peaked. “I believe that to write a book is a gift from God,” she says.
“I thought, Who am I to ask God for another one?” Before she started writing Kin in 2022, she worked for a few years on another novel, which she thought would be her follow-up to An American Marriage, but the book never gelled.
“I thought my career was over,” she remembers. “I thought I’d exhausted the creativity that had been given to me.” Kin reenergized her. “You don’t know how grateful I am to this story. I feel blessed.”
Now that Jones is done writing Kin, she can put more focus on her friends and family. A nurturer by nature, she likes to bake pound cakes and give them as gifts, and enjoys spending time with her little goddaughter and visiting with the older people in her life. “Old people need help, and I like hearing their stories,” she remarks. She’s grateful to all her readers, especially the Black women who’ve always supported her. “I hope with every book I write that it heals something in someone,” she says. With Kin, the author feels she was healed, too.
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
