Get Lit Preview: Angela Flournoy's 'The Wilderness'

Summary

All Of It — Get Lit Preview: Angela Flournoy’s ‘The Wilderness’

Host: Alison Stewart (WNYC)
Guest: Angela Flournoy, author
Date: February 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of All Of It features Alison Stewart’s conversation with acclaimed novelist Angela Flournoy, centering on her new book, The Wilderness—the February selection for the show’s Get Lit book club. Flournoy discusses the novel’s origins, themes, and characters, sharing insights into the complexities of friendship and coming of age as experienced by four Black women navigating adulthood in America. The conversation delves into the evolution of the novel, generational identity, chosen family, social media’s impact, and writing from multiple perspectives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Evolution of ‘The Wilderness’

• Flournoy began working on the novel in earnest in 2016, inspired by major cultural and political shifts ([01:55]).
• The original title underwent several changes, from “The Wounded Wilderness” (inspired by a Betye Saar painting), to “The Millennials,” and finally to “The Wilderness” for broader appeal ([02:24]-[03:37]).
• Quote:

  “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.”
  —Angela Flournoy [02:27]

2. Main Characters and Central Themes

• Explores the interconnected lives of four friends:
  • Desiree, grieving several parental losses, including her estranged sister
  • Nakia, coming into her identity as a queer woman and a culinary entrepreneur
  • January, facing single parenthood after a breakup
  • Monique, a librarian grappling with viral internet attention and racism at work ([00:10]-[00:54])
• The narrative spans from the 2000s through 2027, shifting between New York and Los Angeles.

3. The Power and Portrayal of Chosen Family

• Inspired by her mother’s lifelong friendship, Flournoy wanted to honor the significance of chosen family, not just the family one is born into.
• Quote:

  “There’s a family you’re born into, but sometimes circumstances are just, you’re lucky, you get these other family, the chosen family.”
  —Angela Flournoy [04:00]

• Alison Stewart shares a relatable anecdote about her own “aunties,” emphasizing the universality of chosen kin ([04:48]).

4. Capturing the Twenties—Messiness and Social Media

• Flournoy aimed to depict the “beautiful mess” of being in your twenties, especially before the omnipresence of social media.
• She reflects on the freedom her characters had in the early social media era, compared to the scrutiny young adults face today.
• Quote:

  “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.”
  —Angela Flournoy [05:24]

• Younger generations now experience amplified pressure due to social media “outside eyeballs” ([06:38]).

5. Writing from a Distance — The Benefit of Hindsight

• Flournoy notes she needed to reach her late thirties to write authentically about this period of life ([06:42]).
• Quote:

  “Now that I am in my 40s, I realize that there is no one moment that you suddenly feel like a grownup...you just are older and you start to...care less about what other people think.”
  —Angela Flournoy [06:42]

6. Characters’ Dreams — Contrast and Tension

• The friends embody different attitudes towards ambition:
  • Nakia is laser-focused on being a restaurateur.
  • January subjugates her artistic ambitions to fit her boyfriend’s stable life vision.
• This creates tension and reflects the reality of friendships with diverging life paths ([07:24]).
• Quote:

  “There had to be a character who already knew what they wanted. This was me in my twenties… And then you have these people who are sort of laser focused on their dreams. Sometimes that can be an inspiration, but sometimes that can also be really annoying.”
  —Angela Flournoy [07:24]

7. Group Storytelling — Multiple Points of View

• Flournoy explains her choice to tell a group story, not just focus on a single friend, to better reflect the realities of friendship networks ([09:01]).
• Her narrative approach is inherently prismatic:

  “We don’t exist in, like, little vacuums...to get a full sense, I needed to tell the whole group’s story of their friendship.”
  —Angela Flournoy [09:01]

8. Building Characters Through Internet Language

• Monique, the librarian character, is presented through her own internet presence (blog, Instagram, poetry).
• Flournoy discusses the challenge and “cringe” of writing believable internet-speak that won’t quickly become dated ([09:51]).
• Quote:

  “It’s very embarrassing to think about the language we use on the Internet. Cause it’s so specific and it is brand new. There are, like, new words that come up every… Every day.”
  —Angela Flournoy [09:51]

9. Reliability of Narration and Truth

• Flournoy ponders the reliability of first-person perspective, asserting that self-perceptions are true to experience, even if not objectively accurate ([11:02]).
• Quote:

  “Oh, are any of us reliable narrators about our own life? ...Because it’s about our perception of what occurred.”
  —Angela Flournoy [11:02]

• Multiple POVs allow the reader to piece together their own understanding of events.

10. Nonlinear Storytelling — Navigating Friendship Memories

• The book’s structure leaps between years, mirroring how people recall friendship — not in a straight line, but through flashpoints and varied perspectives ([11:41]-[12:40]).
• Quote:

  “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...for me, it felt like in order to really tell the story of this group, it had to be a prismatic approach.”
  —Angela Flournoy [11:53]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "There’s a family you’re born into, but sometimes circumstances are just, you’re lucky, you get these other family, the chosen family."
  —Angela Flournoy [04:00]
• "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."
  —Angela Flournoy [05:24]
• "It’s very embarrassing to think about the language we use on the Internet. Cause it’s so specific and it is brand new. There are, like, new words that come up every… Every day."
  —Angela Flournoy [09:51]
• "Oh, are any of us reliable narrators about our own life?...Because it’s about our perception of what occurred."
  —Angela Flournoy [11:02]
• "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."
  —Angela Flournoy [11:53]

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Timeline & Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:10-01:55: Alison Stewart introduces Flournoy and the novel’s premise, key characters, and book club details
• 01:55-03:37: Flournoy discusses the novel’s evolution, titles, and generational perspective
• 04:00-04:59: Flournoy reflects on the inspiration of chosen family; Stewart shares her own experience
• 05:15-06:38: The essence of being in your twenties and the influence of a pre-social media landscape
• 06:42-07:24: The value of hindsight and writing about the past from the vantage of middle age
• 07:24-08:44: Contrasts among the friends’ ambitions and how these impact group dynamics
• 09:01-09:46: Choosing a group narrative structure over an individual focus
• 09:51-10:56: Crafting authentic internet language through character, while avoiding being too timestamped
• 11:02-11:41: Exploring reliability in narration and self-perception
• 11:41-12:40: Explaining the book’s nonlinear structure and friendship storytelling

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Summary

In this engaging preview, Angela Flournoy reveals the deeper layers behind The Wilderness, a novel about Black women forging adulthood—and family—across decades of cultural change. The conversation gracefully weaves personal inspiration, literary craft, and cultural observation, offering listeners not just a glimpse of the novel but powerful reflections on friendship, ambition, and self-understanding in the age of social media. Flournoy’s candid anecdotes and Stewart’s thoughtful questions make this episode both a celebration of the book and a relevant meditation on contemporary adulthood.

Transcript

[Angela Flournoy]

Foreign.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In case you haven't heard, we've announced our February Get Lit with all of it book club selection. We are spending the month reading the novel the Wilderness by Angela Flournoy. It was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the Washington Post and was a fundamental finalist for the Kirkus Prize. It explores a group of friends who lean on each other to help navigate the wilderness of young adulthood. There's Desiree, a woman who is grieving the loss of all of her parental figures in her life, including her estranged older sister, Danielle. There's Nakia, coming into her own as a queer woman and also carving out a path in the culinary world. The character January is in the midst of big life changes. She's broken up with her boyfriend of many years, only to learn she's pregnant with his child. And finally, there is Monique, a college librarian who finds herself in the midst of Internet virality after she decides to speak up about racism she's witnessed at her job. The story spans from the aughts to 2027, from New York to Los Angeles, as these four friends try their best to figure out where they should be headed and how to get there. Angela Flournoy will be joining us for a Get lit event on Monday, February 23rd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. And thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, New Yorkers borrow unlimited E copies of the novel to read along with us. To grab tickets and to borrow your copy, head to wnyc.org getlit but now here's a bit of a preview conversation to get you excited about the novel. I began by asking Angela Flournoy how the finished version of the novel changed from the version she set out to write 10 years ago.

[Angela Flournoy]

Lot of differences, but I would say the biggest one is that in 2016, in the fall of 2016, when I really started working on the book in earnest, there were some big political changes in this country which, you know, reverberated out to the world. And it made me realize that I could only follow the news so much and I had to think about trends, just like what's happening on social media. How are people befriending each other, communicating? I had to think differently about the future, just broadly.

[Alison Stewart]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

No. So there was a period of time where it was called the Wounded Wilderness, which was inspired by a Betye Saar painting. 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.

[Alison Stewart]

How did we end up on the Wilderness?

[Angela Flournoy]

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, 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.

[Alison Stewart]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

Absolutely.

[Alison Stewart]

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]

So when I was born, the first house I ever lived in was my Auntie Lisha'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.

[Alison Stewart]

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, but they weren't my relations.

[Angela Flournoy]

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.

[Alison Stewart]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

My characters, when they're in their 20s, in the late 2000s, early 2010s, 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 gonna take a video of them in the club. Cause 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.

[Alison Stewart]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

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.

[Alison Stewart]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

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 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 desire. She want 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]

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. When did you realize this was gonna be a story about a group versus one member of the group? And the other folks would be satellites.

[Angela Flournoy]

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 POV cause I thought it would be easier. 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]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

There's a character named Monique who is a, as you said, a librarian who also has, like, a moment of virality and she's gonna 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. Cause 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]

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

[Angela Flournoy]

Oh, are any of us reliable narrators about our own life? Yes, I think. I think so. Because it's about 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, then 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]

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]

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.

[Alison Stewart]

That was my conversation with Angela Flournoy, author of the new novel the Wilderness. It's our February get lit with all of it book club selection to get your free tickets to our February 23rd event. And to borrow your e copy courtesy of the New York Public library, head to wnyc.org getlit.

[Angela Flournoy]

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[Alison Stewart]

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[Angela Flournoy]

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[Alison Stewart]

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