How has it felt to see your 2017 essay about police brutality, I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People, do the rounds again following George Floyd’s death?Īt the time I think it felt like a moment of sheer hopelessness, that we’re gonna watch this endless loop of black death and there will be no consequences for it. My dad often says that being right is overrated. What is the most indispensable piece of wisdom that your mum or dad has given you? I just love that tension between the big historical moment and the smaller emotional moment. She talks about being in the cab and the cab driver being the person to relay this news. My mom left her small town in Louisiana and moved to DC the week Dr King was assassinated, and it was the first time she’d ever been anywhere. Was the incendiary political context of 1968 something you wanted to explore as well? I just love that tension between the big historical moment and the smaller emotional moment I started to think about what it would be like to live in that town, to subscribe to that ideology, to reject that ideology, and then to actually be dark-skinned in a place like that.
A town that was so invested in lightness that it wasn’t just a matter of preference, it was something that was almost genetically engineered.
She told me about a town she remembered hearing about when she was a child, where everyone intermarried so their children would just get lighter and lighter. How did your mother’s upbringing in the Jim Crow south inspire the novel? It feels as surreal as I think you’d imagine. It’s an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence as two of our finest writers ever. How do you feel about the tone and style of your writing being compared to novelists such as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison? It explores racial identity at a time when people are really eager to read and engage with conversations about that, which is true all around the world as you see with these protests in all these countries. I think there’s a larger social context into which the book entered the world. Why do you think it is resonating right now? It’s a story about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who decide to live their lives on opposite sides of the colour line – one as a white woman and one as a black woman. The people who are No 1 are household names, like Stephen King!
We were optimistic, but I never imagined that. It was maybe 5 o’clock in the evening and I was just sitting on my couch, and my editor called out of nowhere. What were you doing when you heard the news? And that was on top of your book debuting at No 1 in the NYT bestseller list.
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