In her return to Atlanta, Tayari Jones' new novel 'Kin' explores family and friendship

Caption

The cover of Tayari Jones' latest novel, "Kin."

Credit: Knopf

It’s been nearly eight years since author Tayari Jones released her bestselling novel An American Marriage. Now, the Emory University professor returns with Kin, a story that begins in 1950s Louisiana and stretches from small-town girlhood to Spelman College in Atlanta and Memphis, Tenn.

In Kin, Jones explores motherlessness and chosen family within Black communities, while navigating the realities of Southern life during Jim Crow. In this conversation with GPB’s Pamela Kirkland, Jones talks about how the novel unexpectedly became a historical story, as well as why she moved back to Atlanta to write about the South “from the South.”

Transcript:

Pamela Kirkland: This is GPB; I'm Pamela Kirkland. Atlanta author Tayari Jones has spent her career writing about the lives of Black women in the American South. She's the author of five novels, including An American Marriage — an Oprah Book Club selection — Silver Sparrow, Leaving Atlanta, and more. And she teaches creative writing at Emory University. Her new novel, Kin, follows two girls raised side by side in a small Louisiana town. They grow up like sisters, but their lives take very different paths. The book is just out this week. Tayari, thank you so much for joining me on Morning Edition. 

Tayari Jones: Thank you for having me. 

Pamela Kirkland: So, I wanna ask, it's been a couple years since American Marriage came out. 

Tayari Jones: Eight. Eight years. 

Pamela Kirkland: I've been anticipating the next book, but I'm curious how Kin even came to be. 

Tayari Jones: You know, that is actually a more complex question than I would have thought because I'm normally a writer. I decide what I'm gonna write about and then I write to explore that topic. But this is not the book I was contracted to write. I thought I was gonna write a book about modern Atlanta and about gentrification and the question of can you gentrify your own neighborhood? But I was trying to write that book and it wasn't happening. Like, I don't know, the magic wasn't there. I felt like I was using a hammer and nails and I was, like, making a lot of noise when I should have been making music. Finally, the book is two years overdue, three years overdue. I just took out a piece of paper and just started just exploring with a pencil. Not even a pen; a pencil that I had to sharpen like, you know, with the old-school crank. And I started writing and I saw these characters, Annie and Vernice, and they were living in the 1950s. And I thought, "Oh my goodness, well, these clearly are the parents of my real characters" because, you know, while I may contain multitudes, I do not contain a historical novel — or so I thought. But once I got about 100 pages in, I said, "Oh, my goodness. This is not backstory. This is the story."

Pamela Kirkland: That's so interesting. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but you do kind of pull in those threads of gentrification when you're talking about Atlanta in the book at that time. You talk about an interstate that's gonna divide the old Fourth Ward, which ended up happening. So it's interesting to hear you say that because I can see where you pulled that in in a couple different sections. 

Tayari Jones: Well, the landscape of Atlanta is endlessly intriguing to me, the way — what changes, what doesn't. Like, I even had fun in my research in remembering the old names for streets; to always remember to say Hunter Street, not MLK. You know, Sewell Road versus Benjamin E. Mays. You know, things like that. And so I had to think about the physical, my hometown, the physical space of my hometown but before I was born. 

Pamela Kirkland: I want to ask you about the imagery. I'm reading Kin, and I'm thinking about hot, sticky, Southern summers. And I'm think about the wallpaper peeling off my grandmother's kitchen wall. How do you get into that groove of writing just so vividly about some of the things that your characters are seeing and experiencing? 

Tayari Jones: You know, I feel that it's something that we can — that we all do. I think that when you sit down to — a lot of people, when they sit down to write, they turn off their regular mind and they try to turn on the writer's mind. And I feel when they do that, you're cutting yourself off from your greatest resource. Think about when you get together with friends and you start talking about the past. Your friend will say something that will trip a memory. And you'll be like, "Oh my God, I completely forgot that happened." Or forgot we used to eat that or go there. And you keep elaborating and it becomes more and more vivid. So you do it kind of instinctively in your conversation, but a lot of people forget how to do it when they start to write. It's almost like they wanna translate their thoughts into writing words instead of understanding that the language is something you have with you all the time. So I work very hard at keeping, making sure there's no boundary between how I think and how I write. 

Pamela Kirkland: You find out in the beginning of the book, both girls are motherless: Annie, who goes on her journey to go find her biological mother; Niecy's mother has died very early in her life. What story did you want to tell when it came to growing up without a mother, without that maternal anchor in these two very different lives? 

Tayari Jones: Well, with the two girls, with one, Mother is dead, she knows she'll never see her mother again. And so one of her missions in her own life is to find kind of a substitute mother. But for Annie, her mother is out there somewhere and so she has a certain hope. She wakes up each morning, hopeful that she will meet her mother and she goes to bed every night disappointed. And one of my questions is, you know, to what end, to what value, is hope? Is hope overrated? Perhaps. And I also wanted to think about this idea of, you know, we think a lot about they're motherless and they're reared by women who did not intend to rear them. And what is it to be reared by someone who kind of sees you as — "burden" is perhaps too strong of a word, but each of them are aware that the woman who raised them would prefer to be doing something else. And just this way of trying to negotiate our love, our relationships and how important is biology is another question. And I think I've come up with an answer on this biology question. I don't know how, I don't know that biology is as important as our feelings about biology are important. It does not matter, any belief that blood calls to blood and when she meets her mother that she will feel instantly this love she's felt she's been deprived of all her years. And her friends all who have mothers always say, "You know, a mother is a little more complicated than that." But Annie says, "You just say that because you have a mother, you have no idea. I want that connection." And her desire for that connection and her belief that it is biology that will provide it drives her life. And it doesn't matter if she's right or wrong. What matters is what she believes. 

Pamela Kirkland: The title is Kin. In the novel, kinship feels like it's about more than blood. How do you define kin? 

Tayari Jones: You know, kin is something that you get to decide yourself. I think it's gonna be different for what other people want. I mean, I think there are very few people who exclude biological family from kin. You know they say you can't choose your family, but they are your family. But I also think the question of kinship is also about friendship. I'm interested in friends and chosen family because your friends provide a relationship that you choose to re-up on. You know, like, you're kind of stuck with your family, with your biological, even if you choose to go no contact with them, they are still your biological family of record, if nothing else. But your friends, you are constantly making an affirmative decision to continue this relationship. Friendship is a matter of the heart that involves agency. And you can tell a lot about people by who they choose. And that is the question of kinship. So when Annie is asked for her next of kin, she really thinks about it. She's like, is there a next to the next of kin? Is there a last of kin. And she decides that that person is her beloved Niecy; that that is her person. 

Pamela Kirkland: Tayari Jones is the author of Kin and a professor at Emory University. Her new book is out now. Tayari, thank you so much for joining me in the GPB studios. 

Tayari Jones: Thank you for having me. It was great.