Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life, so this is really the fulfillment of a long dream,” she says during a call to her home in Berkeley, California. She and her boyfriend, a writer she met when they were both at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, have recently moved to the Bay Area.

“I feel fortunate not only that my dream came true but that it’s coming true in such a huge way,” Gyasi continues. “On the other hand, the stakes feel really high in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I find myself being a lot more anxious than when I thought no one would read the book. I feel a lot of outside noise has come in now in a way that it never had before. I had always been writing for myself. And now it’s becoming more public. That’s definitely an end goal of a writer, to share their work with readers. But it is a little nerve-racking.”

Gyasi, who turns 27 in late June, spent seven years developing her first novel. Homegoing is a sweeping, emotionally and morally complex epic that begins in the 18th century in the British African colony that is now Ghana. There, two half-sisters—Effia from the slave-trading Fante nation and Esi from the Asante warrior nation—are born and live nearly intersecting lives without ever meeting. Effia is born during a violent fire. As a young woman, she is married off to a British official as a local wife and lives in the upper realms of the Cape Coast Castle, seat of British colonial power. Esi is sold into slavery and imprisoned in the bowels of the castle to await a harrowing journey over the ocean to the American South.

From there, in beautifully textured alternating chapters in which water imagery represents Esi’s line and fire imagery is linked to Effia’s, the novel explores the lives of these women’s descendants. Esi’s progeny live in the U.S. as slaves and then as free people under Jim Crow laws. Effia’s descendants remain in Ghana and experience the effects of British colonialism and bloody internal African warfare. In the end, in the 21st century, the two lines of descendants experience a poignant kind of “homegoing.”

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us.”

“The thing that I was most interested in was the question of what does it mean to be black in America today,” Gyasi says. “So I was very much focused on those last two chapters. I wanted to get to the African immigrant and the African American today. When I first thought of this novel all those years ago, I thought I would toggle back and forth between the characters that make up the first few chapters and the characters that make up the last few chapters to show a then-and-now thing. But then at some point I realized that I was more interested in being able to see the way something moves over a long period of time, in this case slavery, how slavery dovetailed off into this colonialism and institutionalized racism depending on where and how you were looking.”

The novel is propelled by a profound and wrenching sense of history. Yet its characters are emotionally compelling rather than didactic. This is partly because of Gyasi’s “exploratory” style of research. “I didn’t want to feel stifled by the research or the need to get everything exactly, exactly right,” she explains. “I just wanted to have it be this atmospheric thing that was in the background, so that the characters were foregrounded and they were just reacting to a moment in history, as we do now. You know, things are happening around us, but they don’t feel like they always explain our actions and our choices.”

The novel is also shaped by Gyasi’s deep imagining of events and by her family’s experiences. Born in Ghana, she came to the United States when she was 2 years old. Her father is a professor of French and Francophile African literature, and her mother is a nurse. She is the middle of three children and the only girl. Before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 9, the family also lived in Ohio and Illinois. She went to Stanford University and won a Chappell-Lougee scholarship to travel to Ghana and research her novel.

“I’ve only been back [to Ghana] twice,” Gyasi says. “The first time was with my entire family at age 11. And the second time was when I was 20. I had just a very thin idea for a novel in mind. I had never been to the central region where my mother is from. So I wanted to spend some time there.”

Her visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle was the revelation that inspired the novel. “The tour guide started talking about the fact that a lot of British soldiers would marry the local Fante women, and the children from these marriages were sometimes sent to England for school and then came back and started to form the region’s middle class. I’d never heard much about the Cape Coast Castle or about Ghana’s participation in the slave trade. All of this was really new to me. And then the tour guide showed us the majesty of the upstairs level of the castle. It’s beautiful. Then after showing us this upstairs level, he takes us down to see the male and female dungeons. That was also a very striking experience for me—kind of the literal upstairs downstairs thing. And I thought, OK, this is where I’ll start.”

Interestingly, Gyasi says it was reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that gave her permission to write her hugely ambitious novel. “That’s such a great book to read, especially if you are about to write a big, messy novel with a lot of family. Just the idea that a reader can look back at the family tree and that doesn’t totally mess up their reading experience was something I got from that book. [Homegoing has a helpful diagram of the characters’ family tree at the beginning of the novel.] I heard from people who had grievances about how many years it was covering or that there are too many characters. But having read Márquez, I could always say he did it, and it was fine.”

Gyasi adds, “People say that first books tend to be more quiet. They tend to be a lot more autobiographical. But I grew up in Alabama. I was a Ghanaian immigrant. When I was in Ghana, I didn’t feel Ghanaian. When I was in America, I didn’t feel quite American. I was kind of living on the edges of these two identities. I’d always been interested in that, and in what we had in common—the African American and the African immigrant. In that way, this book feels incredibly personal to me.”

Asked about the legacy of slavery that Homegoing explores, Gyasi says, “When we talk about slavery today, there’s a sense that it’s this thing that happened a million years ago, so why do we feel like it has any effect on our life today? And I always think that’s a ridiculous way to think about it.

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us. We wouldn’t have done this awful thing. We would be the ones who stand up and say, ‘Not me.’ But in the moment I think that is a much harder thing to do. So I was really interested in the people who could say that or who tried to say that, whether they were successful or not. I did want to have their voices in the novel as well. Hopefully, this book is an addition to the conversation about why we still need to think about it today.”

Author photo credit Michael Lionstar.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, Joanna Cannon’s debut The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is set during an uncharacteristically hot British summer. When a local woman disappears from the tight-knit community of The Avenue, young Grace and Tilly embark on a quest to find out what happened to their missing neighbor. Cannon discusses how her work as a psychiatrist influences her writing, the nature of outsiders and remembering life in 1970s England.

You’ve had a really interesting career path. Can you tell us how you came to be a writer?  
I started writing a blog when I became a junior doctor, to empty my head of all the distressing things I saw on the wards. Obviously, I didn’t write about real patients, but I found it therapeutic to write about my reaction to the situations in which I found myself. The blog became very popular, and people began suggesting I write a novel. And so (very) secretly, I began writing the book that would eventually become The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

The 1970s was a time when many of the societal changes that had occurred in the cities had begun to hit the suburbs. How do you see those changes manifest in Grace’s community?
One of the reasons I set Goats and Sheep in the 1970s was because of the changes in the structure of communities. Very much like today, it was a time when people were having to adjust their idea of community and their own preconceptions. This is reflected in The Avenue with Harold, for example, who wraps his racism in a Union Jack and calls it patriotism, and Grace’s father, who understands he has to change, but isn’t quite sure how to go about it.

Because Grace is the narrator, she seems to be the more dominant one in the relationship, but Tilly has the stronger, more assured sense of who she is. How do you think their relationship develops over the course of the book?
I think that’s definitely something for each reader to decide for themselves, but I did want to explore the dynamic between Grace and Tilly as the story progresses. It’s around that age we first start noticing the differences between ourselves and other children, and subconsciously modifying our behavior in order to be accepted. Grace is obviously desperate to be liked by the ‘cooler’ kids, whereas Tilly is more comfortable in her own skin.

Is the character of Walter Bishop based on a real person?
No, Walter (and all the other characters) are very much products of my imagination. Working in psychiatry, however, I do meet a lot of people (like Walter) who live on the periphery of a community, and are never really noticed until something goes wrong. I wrote Goats and Sheep because I wanted to give them a voice, and also to explore what it must feel like to be subjected to so much misunderstanding and prejudice.

Were you a big reader as a kid? Who are some of your favorite literary heroes or heroines from childhood?
I am an only child of an only child, and as a kid, some of my best friends lived within the pages of a book. I was very fortunate that my parents had the foresight to take me to my local library every week, where I would always renew Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because I couldn’t bear the thought of the books going home with anyone else.

I read that you created a Spotify list of 1970s music to get you in the mood of the novel. What are some of the songs on it?
Oh my word, all sorts of ’70s gems! There’s a lot of Suzi Quatro on there, some UK glam rock, and (of course) Elvis. It wouldn’t be a ’70s playlist without a good dose of Elvis.

Grace and Tilly interview their neighbors about the whereabouts of God, eliciting a variety of ideas and personal concepts. Did writing this novel change your own point of view about religion?  
I think the concept of religion is such a personal one, and it means so many different things to so many different people. There is “traditional” religion in the book, of course, in the shape of the vicar and St. Anthony’s (and Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Forbes fighting over who loves Jesus more), but you can also find God (or love, or spirituality) in many different places (God is everywhere, as Grace often points out to the adults around her). I don’t think it changed my point of view, but it certainly made me explore the idea.

This novel has been optioned for television. Do you think you’ll be involved in the production at all? What would your dream cast be?
It would be wonderful to be involved, because it’s an area I know very little about and it would be so fascinating. I think for that reason, I’m more than happy to hand over the reins to someone else. It would be good to watch from the edge, though, and keep an eye on my characters. I’m very visual when I’m writing, and I tend to see things cinematographically, so it’s very exciting to see how someone else interprets my words. I’m not sure about a dream cast. I think, especially for Grace and Tilly, it would be good to have completely unknown actors, who don’t arrive with a history of other roles behind them.

Describe your perfect writing day.
My perfect writing day definitely starts with a very long dog walk to clear my head. I always get up around 3 a.m. (which is a hangover from medical school and working on the wards), and I walk my German Shepherd six miles through the fields and we watch the sun come up. I tend to write in the morning and early afternoon, so I think my perfect writing day would have to be one where there were few distractions. Maybe if Twitter crashed, it would help!

What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on Book Two. When I wrote Goats and Sheep, I never expected it to escape from my laptop, so it was truly just me and a blank sheet of paper. I had no idea people would be analyzing my words in newspapers and on the television, whereas now, I’ve had experience of that, and I’m aware of people out there, who will read my thoughts. I think you have to try to put that to one side, and tell the story you want to tell, in the way you want to tell it. It’s the best way to write: just you, a pen and paper and a story you believe in.

Author photograph by Philippa Edge.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

Unlike most first-time authors, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney didn’t start writing fiction until her mid 40s. But that’s not the only thing that makes Sweeney and her debut novel stand out.

As of press time, The Nest, which was published in March, has spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Ecco, which paid a seven-figure advance for the manuscript, has printed 275,000 copies and sold rights in 22 countries; meanwhile, the novel has been optioned for film with “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway (who is also a friend of Sweeney’s) as a producer. Clearly, this story of four adult siblings, who lose an anticipated inheritance thanks to their eldest brother’s big mistake, is resonating in a major way.

We asked Sweeney, who lives in Los Angeles, a few questions about her breakout debut. 

How did it feel to see your first novel hit the bestseller list?
Like everything else that’s happened in my life this year, it was a completely surreal experience. I think the morning I was at a hotel with my husband and the New York Times Book Review was delivered to us—the week my book was at number 2—along with room service breakfast was the most out-of-body moment. I’m still not sure I’ve processed the whole thing.

Early on, you considered going into publishing. How do you think your writing career would be different if you had? What do you think your years as a marketing copywriter brought to this book? 
The first question isn’t one I can really answer. I don’t look back and try to reimagine decades of my life on a different path—it’s too vertigo inducing. I also try to find value in my past decisions, even the ones that I quickly regretted or realized I had to undo. My years as a freelance writer were incredibly important because I grew into a very disciplined and focused worker. I understand that writing is a job, and you need to show up for work every day. I believe that some days are easier than others, but I don’t believe in waiting for inspiration to strike. 

Now that The Nest is in the hands of readers, have there been any reactions to it that surprised you?
I always described the book as being about family. It’s surprised me to hear it described by other people as a book about money. The plot centers on money, of course, but I don’t think it’s what the book is about, per se. We don’t talk a lot about money in this country—I think the book has given people the opportunity to talk about something that is important in everyone’s life but rarely discussed in public.

This book really delves into the relationships between adult siblings—the deep connection, but also the way that the family you create can sometimes be a point of conflict with the family you were born into. Why did writing about adult siblings appeal to you?
I grew up in a very Irish-Italian Catholic environment and almost everyone I grew up with had lots of brothers and sisters. I’m the oldest of four, and I always described our family as “small”—and it was small compared to most of my friends’ families. I’ve always been interested in sibling dynamics and how those relationships become more intense as everyone ages.

Again, from a plot perspective The Nest is about four adult siblings fighting over money, but I believe the book is really about the one thing we all inherit simply by being born: our place in a family narrative. We just become the youngest or the oldest and often are assigned other convenient labels—the smart one, the pretty one, the funny one—that may be rooted in truth but are still reductive and hard to shake off. 

I’m also interested in the idea that because you share DNA and a history with people, you will necessarily share values or a common vision for the future. Sometimes you will and sometimes you won’t and either way is okay!

The characters in The Nest are struggling with something we all have to face—to differing degrees depending on circumstances—but all of us, eventually, have to reconcile the story we inherit with the one we want to write for ourselves. It’s hard to claim your own desires and take responsibility for your own choices—and mistakes. The Nest is definitely a book about making mistakes and discovering who in your life will forgive you and help you when things are tough. 

Do you agree with Warren Buffet’s maxim that “a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing”?
I am the worst financial adviser on Earth, but that sounds like a wise plan! I mainly believe that it’s a very complicated, personal decision and depends on the people involved.

You’ve lived on both coasts. How do you think attitudes about money and wealth are different in Los Angeles vs. New York City?
New York City is a much older city than Los Angeles and so it has layers of old money, which is a very particular and exclusive kind of club. Los Angeles money is newer and it’s a little flashier, but more inclusive. If you can pay, you belong! There’s plenty of that in New York City, too, but there is also plenty of the “who are your parents and grandparents and Yale or Harvard?” kind of exclusivity that doesn’t really exist in Los Angeles, a place where people can reinvent themselves week to week if they choose. 

What would you blow a huge inheritance on?
An apartment in New York City, and if there was any left over, a little place in Rome.

What are you working on next?
I hope I’m working on a new novel, but it’s a little too soon to tell.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What does it mean to pursue the American dream in the 21st century? To find the answer, writer Imbolo Mbue traces the lives of two very different couples in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 in her insightful debut. We asked her a few questions about her own experience moving to America from Cameroon, her love for New York City and who she’d like to see play her characters on screen.

Your own immigration story is almost as dramatic as the Jongas’. Can you tell us about it?
My immigration story has some parallels to the Jongas. Like them, I moved from Limbe, Cameroon, to the United States, though I came here at a younger age to attend college, unlike Jende and Neni who moved here as adults. I lived in Harlem for several years, so like them, I was also an African immigrant living in Harlem. That, however, is where much of our similarities end—most of their story, and the struggles they endured, was inspired by stories told to me by other immigrants.

You have been in the United States for more than 10 years. Do you get to visit Limbe? What do you miss about it?
I’ve been back to Limbe a couple of times to visit and even after all these years, I still miss it. I miss the utter simplicity of life there, and the delicious food and laid-back ambiance.

What made you decide to write a novel?
I was inspired to write this story after I saw chauffeurs and executives on a Manhattan street. Being that I had lost my job in the recession, I was curious about how the recession had affected New Yorkers from different walks of life, so I began writing a story about a fictional Lehman Brothers executive and his chauffeur, and the different ways in which their lives were impacted after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The more I wrote the story, the more obsessed I became with telling it.

Neni is such an incredible character. There is almost nothing she won’t do to make her dreams come true, and some of her actions are pretty shocking. How do you feel about Neni, and what inspired her character?
Thank you—she is indeed an incredible character. She believes in the accessibility of the American Dream, and she is convinced America can give her the life she could never have gotten in Limbe. Because she had limited opportunities to make something out of her life in Limbe, she is mindful of what a privilege it is to be living in New York City and attending college with aspirations of one day becoming a pharmacist. As a result, she will not let anything or anyone stand in the way of her dream, something I find admirable even if I do not entirely agree with how she goes about doing it. Still, I do empathize with her, because she was inspired by women I grew up around in Limbe, and immigrant women I’ve met in America—strong-willed women with limited power and resources who make tough choices because they believe they have to do what they need to do for themselves and their children.

There is so much about New York City in this novel—Jende considers Columbus Circle the center of the world since it is in the center of New York City, and Neni muses that “while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child.” What does New York City mean to you?
I love New York. It’s a pity that phrase has become a cliché but there really is no better way for me to express how I feel about my adopted hometown. As strange and chaotic a place as it can be sometimes, it was only when I moved to New York City that I finally felt at home in America. Maybe something about New York reminds me of Limbe. Or perhaps it’s because the city, in my opinion, welcomes anyone from anywhere. I’m not entirely sure. What I’m sure is that I have a great sense of belonging here, and as an immigrant, that means a lot.

The Edwards family has achieved the American dream, but it certainly hasn’t made them happy. Do you think observing the Edwardses made Jende and Neni see America and their dreams of success differently?
No, I don’t think so. The Jongas, Neni in particular, are so determined to achieve career and material success that not even seeing the price of holding unto it will deter them. The truth is that both the Edwards and Jongas are unhappy in their own ways, à la Tolstoy. One family is dreaming of achieving material success and the other family already has material success, but we can see the prices they each have to pay.

The themes of this novel are very timely. One character says of America that “we as a country have forgotten how to welcome all kinds of strangers to our home.” How do you see novels like yours fitting into the debate on immigration?
I think it’s a novel people on either side of the immigration debate can use to support their arguments. If you’re pro-immigration, there’s something in the novel to support your argument. If you’re anti-immigration, there’s something in there to support your argument, too. My goal was to tell the story completely and leave it up to the reader to interpret it in whichever way fits their worldviews.

I don’t want to give away the ending. But when you were writing, did you know what was going to happen to the Jongas?
Yes, from the very first draft, I knew how the story was going to end and I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to.

This book has been optioned for film—do you have any news on that project? A dream cast?
I don’t have any news but if someday the movie is made, I’d be very eager to see the scenes between Neni Jonga and Cindy Edwards—those two women are fire and ice and their relationship exposes a lot about class and power.

Who are some of your favorite African writers? Anyone new that we should be looking for?
I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen last year and deeply loved it. It took me back to my childhood in Limbe, and to me there’s nothing quite like a book that reminds me of what it was like being an African child growing up in Africa. I had a similar experience reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, another novel I loved by a young African writer. I’m very much looking forward to both of their second novels.

Were you a big reader as a kid? What were some of your favorite books?
I was a voracious reader as a kid, though I barely read any children’s books. My favorite stories growing up were Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, even though thinking about it now, I have no idea how such books could deeply affect a young child.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on my reading list—too many wonderful books coming out and not enough time to read them, so I’m trying to read as fast as I can!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Behold the Dreamers.

Our October Top Pick in Fiction is Brit Bennett's The Mothers, an elegant and insightful coming of-age story set in Southern California. We asked the 26-year-old Bennett, who has just been named one of the National Book Award Foundation's "5 under 35," a few questions about her engrossing debut.

You started writing The Mothers when you were around the same age that Nadia is at the start of the story, and now you’re more or less the same age as Nadia at the novel’s end. Are there parts of this book that could only have been written by 20-something Brit (or, conversely, only by 18-year-old Brit)?
I think the Nadia and Aubrey scenes were important to write when I was younger because there’s nothing like the passion of friendship when you’re in high school. The Nadia and Luke or Aubrey and Luke scenes benefited from me growing a little older. Heartbreak and romantic disappointment were just abstract ideas to me when I was 18; they became much realer once I had lived a little longer.

What’s one major difference in the version of The Mothers that readers will experience today versus those early drafts? 
The novel changed a ton over time. One major difference is that originally, Aubrey was the main character. Nadia was a minor character, hovering in the background with a big secret that would affect the church. Eventually, though, I realized that Nadia’s secret interested me more and beyond that, her secret was the engine driving the entire story forward.

Are there any aspects or elements that remained constant over the years?
The element that surprised me with its consistency is the opening line. I recently found a draft from 2009 and was stunned to realize that even back then, the opening sentence was the same.

"Heartbreak and romantic disappointment were just abstract ideas to me when I was 18; they became much realer once I had lived a little longer."

One of the things that can be the most striking when we revisit a book is that our sympathies for and alliances with the characters can shift. Did you find while writing this book that your sympathy migrated to and from different characters or that you identified more or less with certain characters? 
As I grew older, my sympathies expanded beyond the characters who are easily likable. Originally, I conceived of Mrs. Sheppard, the pastor’s wife, as a villain, but I challenged myself to write sections from her point of view and consider how her past motivates her actions. Luke, also, was an easy character to dismiss at first. He’s incredibly frustrating, but again, I wanted to explore the nuance of his character and try to provide him with a rich interior life. The toughest character to get on the page, though, has always been Nadia. She’s naturally guarded, so her inclination is to push you away and keep you out. It was tough to get close to her.

The Mothers features a cast of richly drawn and multidimensional characters, but we spend the most time with Nadia, watching her grow from a wounded girl into a complex and complicated young woman. What do you love most about her?
She does what she wants to do. I’ve also been cautious, so I admire Nadia’s willfulness, even when it borders on impulsiveness. She’s daring, in a way I often hesitate to be.

One of the most impressive things about this book is its strong and clear point of view. Certainly the omniscient church mothers who act as a Greek chorus and narrate and comment on portions of the novel are one of the biggest contributing factors to that. Can you tell us a bit about how that particular element of the book came to be?
I originally wrote the book in a gossipy, omniscient third person voice, but toward the end of revising, I wondered what would happen if I located that voice in an actual character. The church mothers were the obvious choice. They had already been hovering around the story, watching and observing and commenting, so I began to play around with the idea of their collective voice narrating the story.

Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, has said that any book featuring people that is set in the United States is a book that is ultimately about race. To what extent do you agree with this sentiment and see it reflected in The Mothers?
I think Angela’s point is that it’s ridiculous to think that the only books about race are books about people of color. We all live in raced bodies, so we all have racialized experiences and perceptions and opinions. Whiteness is still a racialized experience, so a book that, for example, only contains white characters is still engaging with race. That being said, I think The Mothers engages with race but without foregrounding racism. The characters’ experiences and perceptions and expectations are inflected by race, but racism isn’t their biggest conflict. I resent the idea that black lives only have meaning if they are presented in conflict against white racism. I was more interested in exploring a black community made up of complicated people living complicated lives shaped by race but not solely defined by racism.

"I resent the idea that black lives only have meaning if they are presented in conflict against white racism. I was more interested in exploring a black community made up of complicated people living complicated lives shaped by race but not solely defined by racism."

It sometimes feels like there are few genuine taboos remaining in modern American society, but abortion still remains hugely controversial if not outright scandalous; it’s still incredibly rare for it to be discussed and explored in fiction, film or television. Why do you think that is? 
I think the political debate over abortion surrounds some pretty huge questions. When does life begin? How much autonomy does a woman have over her body? Does the right to life supersede the right to control what happens inside your own body? These are huge, complicated, emotional questions that often trigger larger debates about sexuality, morality, religion and politics. Any one of those issues might make people uncomfortable; conversations about abortion often invoke all of them.

Politics aside, I think abortion is also rare in narratives because it can be difficult to write. It doesn’t generate story as naturally as a pregnancy might. If you write a pregnant character, for example, you can write the various stages of the pregnancy, the birth, the relationship with the baby, etc. With an abortion, there is no obvious next step, so it requires more work from the writer than writing a pregnancy might.

Have you encountered any resistance to the book (either before its publishing or since) because one of the characters elects to terminate a pregnancy?
So far, I surprisingly haven’t encountered much resistance about the abortion within the novel. I think it helps that the novel doesn’t try to convince the reader to feel one way or another about abortion. I’m not interested in making a political argument. Abortion is complicated, and I wanted to explore how these characters would experience that complexity.

Since you started writing at a young age, you must have been a voracious reader as well. Was there a particular book that inspired you to want to write one of your own? 
In elementary or middle school, a teacher gave me a copy of The Outsiders, which I loved. I was also inspired by the fact that S.E. Hinton published the book when she was 18, and I took that as a personal challenge to see if I too could write a novel while I was still a teenager.

"I was inspired by the fact that S.E. Hinton published ['The Outsiders'] when she was 18 and I took that as a personal challenge to see if I too could write a novel while I was still a teenager."

Like your protagonist, you also grew up in Southern California before moving to attend the University of Michigan. What was your favorite (and least favorite) thing about living in the Midwest? About California?
My favorite thing about Ann Arbor was the community I found there. I’d never had writer friends until I pursued an MFA, and my friends were so vital in keeping me sane through three very cold winters. When I was in Michigan, I missed the year-round sunshine of California. I could weather the cold, but the gray skies depressed me. Now that I’m living in Los Angeles, I do miss the seasons in Ann Arbor. Winter suffering aside, there was nothing like that happiness I felt on the first spring day.

While you were pursuing your MFA and working on this novel, you spent some time teaching undergraduate courses, including Introduction to Creative Writing. What was your favorite writing exercise to assign and what was the best piece of writing advice you have given your students (or that someone gave you)?
My favorite writing exercise to assign was for my students to craft a character based on someone they’d Facebook-stalked. It was a fun way to engage the voyeuristic curiosity we all feel online and to challenge them to turn a few observed details into a fully fleshed-out character. The best advice I received is from an MFA professor who encouraged us to always begin with a question in mind. I think about this in my nonfiction as well as my fiction. The work becomes more interesting and open if you begin with a question, rather than an argument or a claim.

What are you working on next?
A new novel set in the South about a pair of sisters who get separated. 

Canadian writer Stephenie Harrison lives in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. She blogs about the expat life at 20 Years Hence.

(Author photo by Emma Trim.)

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Mothers.

Rachel Khong makes her fiction debut with the small-but-mighty Goodbye, Vitamin, the story of 30-year-old Ruth, who moves home to help care for her aging father, Howard, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In poignant and often hilarious journal-like entries, Ruth charts the joys and sadness of her days at home and ultimately her journey through grief.

Khong, the former executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food, makes us laugh once again as she shares the secret behind her first novel’s diary style and shakes her fist at memory.

How much of this story is drawn from your own life experiences?
My father doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, I’ve never had a fiancé break up with me, and I’ve never spent a year at home being a caretaker. But I do know about career-related ambivalence, about heartbreak and about anger. I’m also forgetting things every day. I’m often asked if I have personal experience with Alzheimer’s and I do—my late grandmother had Alzheimer’s. But I’m hesitant to place too much emphasis on it, because though it resembled Howard’s at times, her experience was very different, and our relationship was nothing like Ruth and Howard’s in my book. It informed my writing, but wasn’t the reason I wrote this book.

The story unfolds through journal-like entries, which is really effective in offering intimate glimpses into Ruth’s state of mind. Why did you choose this format? Are you a diarist yourself?
I wish I could say I chose the format for some intelligent reason, but it wasn’t as much a choice as it was what was possible for me. I didn’t know how to write a novel, but I did know how to write paragraphs. Stringing those paragraphs together was how I was able to write this book. I had been reading books like Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat by Renata Adler, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison—short books made up of much smaller pieces. And these were books that, despite their length, nevertheless made an outsized impact on me.

I am not a diarist, but last year I started writing in Tamara Shopsin’s Five-Year Diary, a little notebook that has five spaces on every page for every day of the year. There’s only enough space for a few lines, so it’s something that’s easy to do right before bed. The point is so you can look back on the year before, or five years before, and see how your life has changed. That’s been a useful exercise in perspective.

Goodbye, Vitamin is part break-up story, part Alzheimer’s story, part family story, part coming-of-age tale. Piece it all together, and it’s a novel about memory. Has your way of thinking about memory changed for you since writing this book?
Something that I thought about memory, and still feel now, is that it is incredibly crappy material we have to work with. It’s faulty, it’s inaccurate, it’s misleading. It leads us to believe relationships are better or worse than they are; it stops us from forgiving us or allows us to forgive too readily. “Memory is shitty,” was the main thing I thought about memory when I started the book, and I still think that now. But while my thinking on memory hasn’t changed—I still think it sucks—writing the book was a way to come to terms with it, in a way. It’s a frustrating thing, but there’s something beautiful, too, about this flaw we all share. It’s human, and it’s imperfect, but it’s what we have.

What kind of research did you do into the effects of Alzheimer’s—both on the individual and on the family?
I don’t have a good answer to this question! I read a lot on the subject—from books to discussion threads on Metafilter and Reddit. But a lot of it was imagination. It’s easy to imagine your own memory much worse than it is. We’re forgetting things every day, all the time. I don’t have to look too far for examples of that in my own life.

Ruth is such a great character. I loved when she listed things that take up room in her brain (and she wishes wouldn’t), like the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and various taxonomic ranks. What are a couple things taking up unnecessary room in your brain?
As a kid, I was a big fan of the Babysitter’s Club series, and to this day every personality trait of each of the Babysitter’s Club members is still rolling around uselessly in my adult brain. You’d think I should be allowed to free up that space in the hard drive and be better at, I don’t know, geography.

Food doesn’t play a big role in Goodbye, Vitamin, which surprised me considering all the food writing you’ve done. Was that intentional?
I started writing fiction long before I ever wrote about food; this novel, too, preceded the food writing. Though food—both cooking and eating—is certainly one of my interests, it’s just one. People have actually told me that they’re surprised by how much food there IS in the book. I think, in the same way that people have different thresholds or tastes for humor or violence or sentimentality, they have sensitivities about how much food is in a given book. So it’s interesting to me to hear these different reactions. I didn’t intentionally leave food out, nor did I intentionally include it. I tried to correctly represent how often a human might think about or talk about food, and it might be abnormally high or low, but I only have my own experience to go on!

If you had to pick, do you think Goodbye, Vitamin is more tragic or funny?
Hopefully funny!

You’ve said that you never thought you’d write a novel. Now that you have (and it turned out so well!), do you think you’ll do it again? And again?
Writing a novel has always been the dream, but it always seemed daunting and impossible, the same way that, when you’re young, it seems impossible that you’d ever possess enough money to be able to buy a car or house. As it turns out, being older really helps, and the main factor in writing a novel or buying a car is simply accumulation of little things into a bigger thing. I’m working on my new novel now, and it’s very different. Decidedly NOT a diary.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Goodbye, Vitamin.

Author photo credit Andria Lo.