Interviewer/Host (2:56)

And the Wilderness wasn't the original name of the book, right?

Angela Flournoy (3:00)

No. So there was a period of time where it was called the Wounded Wilderness, which was inspired by a Betye Saar. And then there was a very short but passionate on my end period of time where it was called the Millennials, which was a little bit tongue in cheek, but also just a little bit like me wanting to claim this experience for myself and for these black women in this book. I feel part of that sort of generational umbrella encompasses my experiences. But there were parts that I felt like had not ever been explored and I wanted to kind of claim it as mine.

Interviewer/Host 2 (3:35)

How did we end up on the Wilderness?

Angela Flournoy (3:37)

Well, there were people who I think maybe are right. My editor was one who was like, you know, we don't want to alienate anybody. There are some, like, you know, Gen Xers don't necessarily want to pick up a book called the Wilderness. There are people, I mean, called, excuse me, called the Millennials. There are people who don't feel that warm towards that generational sort of marker. And they convinced me, I don't want anyone to pick up my book just to hate read it. Right. Like just, just to be like, they're exactly as I thought they were. So.

Interviewer/Host 2 (4:09)

But you know what you show, you don't tell.

Angela Flournoy (4:11)

Absolutely.

Interviewer/Host 2 (4:12)

Which is the important part about it. You write in the acknowledgments. This novel of friendship and my belief in the power of true friendship was first Inspired by the 51 year Soul Deep Connection between my late mother, Francine Harper and her best friend Leisha Williams. What about that friendship inspired you?

Angela Flournoy (4:32)

So when I was born, the first house I ever lived in was my Auntie Alicia's house. My mother was one of four sisters, but she was always looking for more sisters. So she met Alicia James, who I call my auntie, I call her children, my cousins, when she was in middle school. And they moved out together, got jobs, started working in the city, in LA together. And to me, it really inspired me to think differently about family. There's a family you're born into, but sometimes circumstances are just, you're lucky, you get these other family, the chosen family. And for me, I can't imagine my life without that chosen family. But I had not seen it sort of given the same pride of place in the way people think about long term relationships that are important to them.

Interviewer/Host 2 (5:20)

It's so funny cause I Had my Auntie Carolyn, my Auntie Madeline, my Auntie Gracie. None of them were related to us. They were all my aunts.

Angela Flournoy (5:29)

Right.

Interviewer/Host 2 (5:29)

But they weren't my relations.

Angela Flournoy (5:31)

And they bring a perspective that's outside of. They didn't grow up exactly as your parents grow up. So they have this outside perspective, especially in your teenage years, which is really valuable to hear that there are other lessons they perhaps learned when they were growing up in their household that they can give to you that you would not have otherwise.

Interviewer/Host 2 (5:47)

What was an aspect of being a 20, something that you wanted to make sure you captured in this novel?

Angela Flournoy (5:56)

My characters, when they're in their 20s, in the late 2000s, early 2000s, they are a mess. They are a beautiful mess. I really wanted to capture the feeling of not really knowing what you're supposed to be doing, and also the feeling of what it's like to just exist without the eyeballs of social media. So because of the period of time, sure, they were like the first generation on social media, but it wasn't always present in their lives. So they're in the club and they're not worried that anyone's going to take a video of them in the club because nobody's phones can do that, you know, not well in 2012. So they have. They are living in the present, in this moment, in this way that I feel when I have one sister who's 25, and I do feel sadness about that. Like, doesn't mean she doesn't go out, et cetera, but there's this like, outside eyeball, outside opinion thing that sort of hovers over her. And I'm hoping when younger people read this, they. They don't just see that they're a mess in their 20s, but that also, like, it's okay. They had nobody to tell them it wasn't okay. But now I think a lot of young people have these expectations that come from social media.

Interviewer/Host 2 (7:10)

Was that something that you needed to be in your late 30s to write?

Angela Flournoy (7:14)

Absolutely. In my 20s, I think I just wanted to do what I needed to do to become middle class, have some kind of. While also, of course, picking a path, a career path, that has no guarantee of that. I still had that deep sort of desire to feel like a grownup. And now that I am in my 40s, I realize that there is no one moment that you suddenly feel like a grownup. You just. Even if you have kids, you just are older and you start to. If anything, it's just you care less about what other people think is where you should be in your life.

Interviewer/Host 2 (7:50)

Did you have dreams when you were in your 20s? And do your characters have certain dreams?

Angela Flournoy (7:56)

Yes. So one of the things that I think was important about choosing what kind of careers these women, these young women, have is that there had to be a character who already knew what they wanted. This was me in my twenties. I wanted to be a writer since I was six years old. And there had to be. As exists in the world, I would say the vast majority people are kind of figuring out as they go along because it's a natural point of tension in friendships when it's like, I just have a job because I need to pay bills. I don't know what's gonna come next. And then you have these people who are sort of laser focused on their dreams. Sometimes that can be an inspiration, but sometime, sometimes that can also be really annoying. And I thought it was useful to have a sort of diversity. So we have a character, Nakia, who knows she wants to be a restaurateur. She calls it a proprietress, but she wants to feed her community and have these restaurants. But then there are other characters, like January, who is kind of quiet about her desires. She wants to do graphic design, but she kind of puts it in the backseat to her boyfriend's desires for a kind of stable life. And you don't just dump those friends because your career desires or paths diverge. You have to figure out how to navigate through those differences.

Alison Stewart (9:16)

My guest is author Angela Flournoy. We're discussing her new novel the Wilderness, which follows a group of four friends in their early adulthood in New York and la. It's been long listed for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. When did you realize this was going to be a story about a group versus one member of the group and the other folks would be satellites?

Angela Flournoy (9:38)

So the way that my brain works when I think about characters is I think about everyone around them. I think about, oh, okay, this is what she believes about herself. This is what she believes about her history. But this is what the people around her also believe about these things that have happened. Which is why my first novel had way more POVs. It followed a family of 13 siblings. This novel, I really vowed to have fewer POVs because I thought it would be EAs. But it's just the way that I think about. We don't exist in, like, little vacuums. You know, we're part of communities. And so I could tell a story about friendship, but to me, to get a full sense I needed to tell the whole group's story of their friendship.

Alison Stewart (10:23)

Who was the hardest of the four to really to get into?

Angela Flournoy (10:29)

There's a character named Monique who is a, as you said, a librarian who also has like, a moment of virality and decides she's going to pivot to influencing. I was really interested in having readers have to read through her own words, through her blog posts and her Instagram captions and her poetry, just everything she's sharing on the Internet. I wanted that to be how that character was built. But the thing about that is that it's very cringe, it's very embarrassing to think about the language we use on the Internet because it's so specific and it is brand new. There are, like, new words that come up every, every day. I feel like. And I'm supposed to know, like, what it means when people use some of these, like, catchphrases. And so I had to figure out, like, a sweet spot between trying to be real about what kinds of things she would be writing and also not make it completely live in a moment in time and be like, something people wouldn't understand in a year, specifically with her.

Alison Stewart (11:33)

But I'm curious about all the characters. Are they reliable narrators?

Angela Flournoy (11:39)

Oh, are any of us reliable narrators about our own life? Yes, I think. I think so because it's about our. Our perception of what occurred. I think the way that I try to get around that reliability issue is again, with these multiple POVs. If you get it from enough perspectives and the reader can make their own choice about, okay, is it. Does it make sense that she decides to become an influencer? Is this sort of a big selling out? And also, I think time, like the passage of time, helps you come to your own conclusions because you have to see characters live with their choices.

Alison Stewart (12:18)

Yeah, that was interesting. The structure of the book, it jumps around between 2010 to 2024, even looks to 2027. Why did you want to structure the book this way?

Angela Flournoy (12:30)

So when I ask people who have been in friendships for decades to tell me about, like, the story of their friendship, it is never linear. The way that they. You experience a person, you can put it in a line. And that's usually the boring version of the story. Right? It's like we met and then this and then this. And usually what it is is that there's these pivotal moments and one member, say, if it's two best friends, one person will have one pivotal moment and the other person will have a completely different moment. That seems like, oh, the moment we Knew we were going to be friends forever, for instance. So for me, it felt like in order to really tell the story of this group, it had to be a prismatic approach. Like, you pick the thing up and you look at it from different angles, and at the end, you get a sense of all of it, which is the name of the show.

Alison Stewart (13:20)

Thank you so much. There's a part in this book which I don't think I've ever read in a book before. It was both exciting to read, and it really got to the heart of the book. And I don't want to give too much away, but you write about a woman having sort of a vaginal prolapse in the book, and her friend gets on her knees to check it out. It's just an incredible scene in the book. Could you tell me about the decision.

Interviewer/Host 2 (13:52)

To write about that?

Angela Flournoy (13:53)

Sure. So I had a child in September. She's almost five. So almost five years ago, September 2020. And I don't know if it was the extra isolation of COVID or what, but it felt like, you know, you have a kid and they're like, good luck, Good luck.

Alison Stewart (14:12)

Good luck with that.

Angela Flournoy (14:13)

Take it home. Keep it alive.

Alison Stewart (14:14)

Yes, it's true.

Angela Flournoy (14:15)

And so the postpartum period, I felt like, oh, I'm just gonna have to go Google it all. Like, as far as what happens to your body after you give birth, and then speaking to other moms or people who had kids in my life, I realized, oh, everyone had to do this, and that's not okay, that everyone had to figure it out as it happened to them. Because so much of maternal. When you're pregnant, prenatal care is just preparing you for what the baby needs. And your body, it's just kind of like, left on the side of the road. And so I wanted. I knew absolutely that there would be a character who had that feeling like, things are happening to me that no one told me might happen to me. And as far as who she trusted to check it out, this is just the thing about girlfriends, right? Is that sometimes you get to an age, you know, maybe if you have a sister, you can ask them, but sometimes they've just got to be the ones who tell you. And I've had friends who've had children, and whether it was like a part of their body they didn't even know could bruise, had a bruise. Is this normal? These are things that are suddenly in the group chat when it used to just be, you know, selfies of us at the club. But our lives have changed, and now we have to figure out for each other, like, is this an emergency? So absolutely, it just happens.

Alison Stewart (15:37)

It's something that your friend does for you. My guest is Angela Flournoy. Her new book is called the Wilderness. I was asked you to read a little bit from the book and you picked the first couple of pages. Would you set this up for us?

Angela Flournoy (15:50)

Yes. So the book begins with the characters, with two characters, a character, Desiree and her grandfather Nolan. And they are on a trip, which I don't think it's a spoiler to say, because it's the first chapter of the book, but it is on a trip that he has, Nolan has devised to get medical, medically assisted suicide. So I'm just going to read a little bit of that. Some descents thrill more than others. Landing at Charles de Gaulle is not thrilling as it's one of those major metropolitan airports tucked away from the city in a way that prevents worthwhile aerial views. In Cairo, depending on your point of origin, if you sit on the lucky side of the plane, you might see the pyramids at Giza brushing up against desert on one side and high rises on the other, as if the pyramids were digitally superimposed instead of the oldest structures there. Arriving at lax. If you're traveling west from New York, say, you might have to wrap your head around snow capped mountain ranges, smog blanketed valleys and the glinting Pacific before touching down. When the pilot announced their descent into Charles de Gaulle, Desiree looked out the window, expecting to see what the Eiffel Tower, maybe. She saw nothing so spectacular. Deep browns and greens, the blank gray of cement apartment buildings. They had taken a red eye from Los Angeles. The cabin was quiet and most shades were drawn. Nolan slumped a row ahead. His arm had drooped over the aisle, sea armrests for most of the ride, liver spotted knuckles grazing the tube of light on the floor. Desiree had hardly slept, and when she did, she felt guilty, jolting upright and peeking between the seats to check on him. Now, at landing, her grandfather coughed an uncomfortable cough because it made others uncomfortable, reminded them of mortality. Anyone within earshot felt culpable. Should they pat him on the back, Call for help, Offer water? A wheezing, hacking, full bodied affair that prompted a biological anxiety, like riding an elevator with a very pregnant woman. An awareness that something, some type of above and beyond compassion or physical contact might be required of a stranger toward another stranger.

Alison Stewart (18:16)

That's Angela Flournoy, reading from her book the Wilderness. Danielle and Desiree, they are estranged, ostensibly because of this agreement. For their grandfather to go to Europe for assisted suicide. Were there other, were there other seeds of discontent in the relationship before that point?

Angela Flournoy (18:39)

So I'm very interested in familial estrangement and I'm very interested in it because when I feel like when I was younger there were just. I come from a very big family on both sides. It would be like great uncles, great aunts. You would ask them why they didn't speak to someone in 10 years. And they would say something like, I gave him $500 and then he didn't pay me back. But that was never it. Right then you would realize, okay, that was like the final straw. But there things, at least on one side, the other person maybe was none the wiser, but it was an entire novel worth of interaction. And so in this case, this moment when she, when Desiree decides to help their grandfather and they do not tell Danielle, becomes the thing that Danielle can point to as like the moment of estrangement. But there are always other things. And part of the journey of the novel is one side, the Desiree side, having to try to move on with life without knowing exactly what it is. That's what hurts so much about estrangement, is that usually you don't know. One person doesn't call the other person up and say, I'm not speaking to you anymore. That's very considerate, if so. But a lot of times, you know, we call it ghosting now they just disappear away. Yeah. And the other person is left to wonder. And over the course of the novel, I wanted to feel that one. I wanted the reader to be able to feel that one sidedness. But then we do eventually get Danielle's side. And it is clear that it is a bigger situation of sort of sibling who gets the affection from the grandfather and when, but also grief and also just the age, how young they were when it all happened. Sometimes those emotions can feel so huge because you didn't have the language at the time to work through them. So you kind of just held it. You just held that hurt forever. It could be if you don't ever take a moment to figure out, well, why was I so upset about this at only 23 years old, was it that huge? And so this is one of those scenarios.

Alison Stewart (20:41)

You mentioned Nakia, she's a line cook, she wants to own her own restaurant. You know, it goes between back and forth between New York and la. And Nakia doesn't fully connect with New York. She doesn't really find her place. Why is living in New York particularly Hard for Nakia.

Angela Flournoy (20:58)

So Nakia comes from a well to do sort of upper middle class family. She grew up in Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles, which is like a black upper middle class neighborhood. And it is both just quite frankly, she would never say this to herself, but it's the security of her parents, you know, being there, but also the largeness of the city is something that she can't really relate to, I should say. I love New York. I've lived in both places and I love living in New York. But she also, one thing she says is that she wants to ride her bike without feeling like she's going to die. Which is very funny because New York has way more protected bike lanes than la. But a lot of Angelenos for some reason think that people drive better there. I don't know if it's true, but I think more lanes. Yeah. I think it's just the bigness of the city, which I think a lot of us are inspired by or energized by. It's overwhelming for her.

Interviewer/Host 2 (22:00)

We talked about Monique a little bit the librarian. January is such an interesting character.

Alison Stewart (22:11)

What, you know, she.

Interviewer/Host 2 (22:11)

She gets pregnant in this book. It's a long story. She gets pregnant in this book. What excites her about being pregnant and what scares her about being pregnant?

Angela Flournoy (22:21)

What excites her about being pregnant is, well, one, she's definitely a victim of biological clock messaging. So she believes, I think she's around 33 when she gets pregnant and she's like, it's now or never. This is a good time. Technically, I feel like I should just do this now because my body is primed to do it now. But there's also. She's an only child. I think she has an interest in expanding her family in this way by having a child. What scares her is she outside of her partner, her boyfriend, who she is broken up with when she learns she's pregnant. She doesn't have any money. She's got a tiny studio in Harlem. She's got a few graphic design clients, but she is really building it and it's a, a huge unknown. Am I going to be able to get it together to raise and provide for this child?

Interviewer/Host 2 (23:15)

It's interesting. What role does money play in the book?

Angela Flournoy (23:19)

Oh, money plays a lot of roles. Contemporary life. Right.

Interviewer/Host 2 (23:24)

With these four women. It's interesting.

Angela Flournoy (23:26)

Yeah. I thought, I mean, again, this is one of the things I think that particularly I graduated from college, I don't know, like six months before Bear Stearns Stearns collapse. Oh, gosh. I immediately Got laid off. And it was lucky for me because I really wanted to go get an MFA in creative writing. And suddenly nobody was like, this is a bad idea, because there were no jobs. So everybody before who was like, this is a bad idea, was like, go ahead and do that. But I think that for me, foundationally, because of that, because of when I entered the workforce, there has always been in my fiction and in the way that I think about characters. I can't pretend that money does not matter. It doesn't feel real to the world that most of us live in. Even now that I know a lot of people who always had money, even with people who have money, there's an illusion that they never think about money. They do. They don't necessarily stress about it, but it's not like it's not in their brain. They think about it more. Sort of long lens versus immediate. Can I swipe, you know, to get on the subway? And for me, I felt like I needed to have a range of that, of both kinds, like, immediately, can I afford to tap to get on the train? And also, like, long lens. What am I trying to leave? How can I further what my parents have established for me? Both kinds of money preoccupations are in the novel.

Interviewer/Host 2 (24:48)

So the novel's been long listed for the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award. You've been through this before with the Turner House. What's different this time around?

Angela Flournoy (24:56)

Wow. Ten years later. The one thing I think is different is that I had. When it's your debut, you really don't have any expectations. Like, I wasn't sitting waiting for the announcement. I was going to take my clothes to the laundromat. And then people started texting me the first time around, and now I was. Because I am aware that it is a thing that I could maybe hopefully be in contention for. I was sitting on my couch, not taking my child to school because I was like, we got to keep refreshing this page. Any award that is judged by other writers, meaning they've taken time, aside from what they would like to be doing with their days, which is writing to read hundreds, if not thousands of novels. It just means a lot to me because I have judged things and I know how much work it is, and I know how there's a lot of good books that are published every single year. So I'm just really grateful.

Interviewer/Host 2 (25:51)

Angela Flournoy will be speaking Monday, September 22, at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper west side. She'll be talking about her new book, the Wilderness. Thanks for being with us.

Angela Flournoy (26:02)

Thank you. This was great.

McDonald's Customer (26:04)

I'mma put you on, nephew.

Angela Flournoy (26:05)

All right, unc.

Alison Stewart (26:06)

Welcome to McDonald's.

Angela Flournoy (26:07)

Can I take your order, miss?

McDonald's Customer (26:08)

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.

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