Tayari Jones wants her readers to take pleasure from Kin, and pleasure is easy to find on its pages. Set amid the nascent hope of the 1960s American civil rights movement, and following the lives of two motherless “cradle friends”, the Women’s Prize-winning novelist’s first new book in eight years is a serious joy.
“I feel like a good book should be pleasurable. I think sometimes when you talk too much about the lessons of the book, you can lose sight of the pleasure,” she tells me over a Zoom call from her home in Atlanta, Georgia.
“People think of empathy as feeling the pain of others. Usually people say, ‘Oh, if you have a lot of empathy, you hurt when others hurt’. But I also think that if you have empathy with someone, you laugh when they laugh.”
Warm, sisterly humour runs through the relationship Jones draws between Vernice, whose mother is killed by her father, and Annie, who has been abandoned by hers. The girls don’t know how resilient they are, I say – especially Annie, who, in a subtle class distinction of the kind that Jones excels at depicting, has even fewer resources than Vernice.
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“Being abandoned has affected her sense of worth, and so she is never quite able to give herself credit for how wonderful she is. That’s why I’m there. She doesn’t know it, but I know it, and I like to think that my affection for her comes through.”
The undertow of tragedy strengthens as Vernice and Annie find themselves on the receiving end of the brutal laws and strictures of the world they live in. In Vernice’s case, this happens when she tries to travel from rural Louisiana to take up her place at Atlanta’s Spelman College – which Jones attended in the late 1980s – but inadvertently sits in the “wrong” section of the bus.
“If you were living in the 50s and 60s, there’s no way you could explain your life without explaining the reality of racial segregation, and I believe this is true not only for black writers, but for white writers. So when they choose not to engage with that, they’re lying,” she says.
“They have decided that their nostalgic memory doesn’t feel as good if they look at the whole picture.”
Jones, who returned to live in her native Atlanta in 2018 after a decade in New York, didn’t intend to write Kin.
“I feel like this story found me, and I. Am. Not. That. Type. Of. Person. I used to be very suspicious of those writers who say, ‘Oh, you know, this is the story that chose me’. I used to feel, like, how is that possible?”
As a black writer, everyone thinks it’s your job to fill in the blanks of lost history.
— Tayari Jones
She sat down to write a contemporary novel set in a fast-gentrifying city, and yet the girl who emerged from her early character sketches appeared to be coming of age decades earlier.
“I am not a historical novelist. I refuse to write historically. So I thought I was just writing backstory. But then, when I got about 150 pages in, I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is not the backstory. This is the story’.”
She had a solid rationale for wanting to stick to the present day.
“As a black writer, everyone thinks it’s your job to fill in the blanks of lost history. You know, [Toni] Morrison wrote Beloved because [its inspiration] Margaret Garner couldn’t write her own story.
“I said, ‘Well, you know what, young writers of the future, I’m going to hold it down for my era. This is one less thing for you to worry about. I’ve got this. No matter how talented you are, little future writer, I think I have a better understanding of now than you will, because I’m here and I’m going to answer the call.’ And then, to further the metaphor, my spiritual phone rang and it was a blocked call. It was, like, ‘Hi, it’s a historical novel, I need you.’ That’s what I feel happened.”
She imbues this explanation with the same comic touch she deploys throughout Kin, which is blessed with a supporting cast of “real characters”.
!['My mother participated in a sit-in movement [in Oklahoma City] when she was only 15 years old, and my dad, when he was older, in university, he was expelled for demonstrating,' says Tayari Jones.](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/RD5DJ3QHK5FJ5NUH5BYGVKUSBQ.jpg?auth=52ea4aca79c480f0c23f34cf1f9e9de45d6806a1dc0128c9e6b3d308bee513d8&width=800&height=1227)
“One of the hallmarks of southern literature, stereotypically, is that everyone is such a character. People think it is about grandmothers and mules and characters who are characters. And because I’ve always been a contemporary novelist and an urban storyteller – I say I’m an urban southern – I’ve always been reserved in my character development. But, with this book, after I threw the original plan out of the window, I felt like, why hold back now?”
In Atlanta, the epicentre of the civil rights movement, Jones, who is 55, was able to consult her elders, including her parents, Barbara and Mack Jones, about their fight for change.
“My mother participated in a sit-in movement [in Oklahoma City] when she was only 15 years old, and my dad, when he was older, in university, he was expelled for demonstrating. He put it all on the line. And they’re not famous, they’re just regular folks who stood up for freedom.”
Their generation are not readily in the habit of sharing the complexities of their lives with their children, she says.
“They are not very forthcoming people. I don’t know how they got this little yapper, writer child.”
She would like Kin to remind people that the desire for freedom, rights and autonomy is far from new. “I hope that it will help people understand the older people in their lives. I mean, they were not born old.”
Alongside the racism of the time, she portrays the starkness of a society that infantilises young women and deprives them of reproductive rights. It’s a subject that has regained topicality following the US supreme court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
“You cannot avoid what it means when people do not have access to not only abortion care but also contraception. When people cannot control their reproduction, they cannot control their lives. And by people I don’t just mean the mothers, the birthing people. I mean the whole culture. No one can plan anything if we cannot control our reproduction. I believe that very strongly. How much am I influenced by what’s happening right now? I guess it put it top of mind.”
Kin’s era was also one in which many people could not be open about their sexuality, though this is one narrative thread that concludes on a note of optimism.
“I end every book with hope, because I imagine it is being read by someone who is having similar experiences to the characters. I never want to leave that person feeling worse than they did before they read my book,” she says.
“You cannot sacrifice the experience of the people who are witnesses to the issue for the knowledge of the people who are not.”
Her approach has won her many fans, among them Oprah Winfrey, who has selected Kin for her influential book club. When she did the same in 2018 with An American Marriage – the compelling story of newlyweds separated when the husband is wrongly jailed – it transformed Jones’ career.
The book, her fourth novel, went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019 – “I really felt like if nothing else happens to me, this is enough” – and she has since written a screenplay for a film adaptation with the Tony award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
“It was a great experience that I will never do again,” she says. “You cannot write a new book while you’re adapting your former book. It’s like finding love and your ex is still living with you. Your ex has to find a new place to live.”
After the Women’s Prize victory, her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was published in the UK for the first time in 2020. It came out in the US in 2011, though even finding a publisher at home was a struggle. She wrote the book having been rejected by every publisher because a then-new app called BookScan was suggesting she wasn’t profitable.
Her creative-writing students were among those who motivated her to keep going. “I said, ‘I cannot face these young people and tell them that you write your story regardless and then let an app run me out of business.’ How could I face those kids?”
A turnaround came after a chance encounter at a writer’s conference with a woman called Judy who said she could help her. She subsequently discovered this “real-life fairy godmother” was her favourite childhood author, Judy Blume. “They say you should not meet your heroes, but you know what I say? You need to get new heroes.”
We talk about the language of Kin, including “trifling”, the insult of choice in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, for Annie’s mother. It has no direct equivalent beyond African-American vernacular, Jones says.
“Trifling is really versatile, because it can mean something as simple as me talking to you and having the camera so close you cannot see how completely chaotic this room is. That is trifling. But also abandoning your children is trifling. It has a range, and the meaning of it is in the tone.”
What I can spot in her room is her unchaotic collection of typewriters – she has 10, though only seven are functional.
“Like, this guy right here,” she says, pointing to a shelf. “He’s super cute, but he’s from 1919. Look how adorable he is. Isn’t he adorable? See how he’s two-tone, black on the bottom, red on the top – you could order the colours you wanted. But in 1919 they had not yet worked the kinks out of typewriters.”
She wrote Silver Sparrow and An American Marriage on a typewriter and hopes to write her next book on one – “You feel so satisfied when you get to the end of a line and it congratulates you with that little ding!” – but as she was writing Kin she acquired Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder.
“It was a nightmare. I was fine and then I wasn’t. It just came out of nowhere. My hand was unsteady and my vision was so damaged I had to wear an eye patch. I wrote this book looking like a pirate. So I had to use the computer, because I needed to increase the font. And that’s the thing: you cannot fetishise your process and be, like, oh, I can only use the [Olivetti] Valentine. If you get like that, you’re asking for writer’s block.”
She is “all better now” and excited to meet “really kind, nice, smart” readers on her book tour. It’s her reward for the years she has “toiled in silence and solitude” and a cherished stage of the process.
“Kin is new. No one has read her. I feel like I’m getting her all dressed up and ready. This is the happiest part for me, this window, when it’s done and it’s not out. No one has hurt her feelings yet. I love it.”
Kin is published by Oneworld on Thursday, March 26th
