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Foreign.
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Welcome, bookcasers. It is the end of February, which means you've eaten all your chocolates and it's time to figure out what to do with your candy Tums hearts until next year. The good news is I have it on good authority that they will last. I think they're a little like Keith Richards. They'll live through whatever. And so you can keep those for another year at those candy hearts.
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C
We're back on the candy hearts.
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B
We are. I figured we could squeeze one more week out of this for the intro. So I'm doing it.
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C
Yeah, I've thought about it over these couple of weeks since we've been talking about it. I think they would survive a nuclear attack.
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I think they would, too. I think it would be like the smoke would clear and you'd have cockroaches and Tum's hearts and Keith Richards.
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Anyway, I'm Charlie Gibson.
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I'm Kate Gibson.
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The bookcase with Kate and Charlie is what you're listening to. And if you are listening to it, we're very appreciative.
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B
We have a terrific book for you this week. Tayari Jones, who you may remember, wrote An American Marriage a few years ago, which was an Oprah Book Club selection, but she's written some wonderful other books like the Silver Sparrow. Anyway, we actually talked to her a couple years ago, which we'll talk about in a second, but her new one is called Kin, and it is the moving story of two women raised in the South. They're not sisters by blood, but they are sisters because they are drawn together. This is very much about the family you choose. One of their mothers was killed when she was a baby, and the other one's mother walked out on her when she was a baby. So they're both living motherless existences for two very different reasons, and they're drawn together as a result. This is a period piece. It reminded me of Toni Morrison. It reminded me of Harper Lee. And so I see what you're saying when you say it's more than a Southern novel. But I also think it fits beautifully within the canon and tradition of great Southern novels, especially historic period pieces.
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C
It's beautiful book, and there's some parallels to Tayari Jones life. One of these two friends goes to Atlanta from a small town in Louisiana, and Tayari Jones said that she has been much more comfortable in her life since she went back to Atlanta.
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She.
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She feels very much a part of that city. She's a wonderful writer. She is. But, you know, we've had many, many Many wonderful writers on this program. It's been a treat. Sometimes you get into a conversation and you just want to talk to this person and talk to this person and talk to this person. She was so much fun to talk to, as you'll see in our conversation or you'll hear in our conversation. And will you hear? One of the things I've gotten fascinated by in recent weeks is that authors keep saying to me that their characters surprise them. I don't understand how that happens.
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B
I've gotten fascinated by this.
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I've gotten down.
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Dad now wants to delve into the mind of each and every writer that asks. I do. How can a character that you create surprise you? That makes no sense to him.
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C
Well, you're the one who's doing this, so. So it's gotta be going through your mind. But wait till you hear how she expands on when a child tells a lie and how the lie expands and expands and expands. It's just. It's the best description I've heard of how a character can surprise you. It's wonderful. She's wonderful.
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B
We talked to her a couple of years ago for Diane Oliver's short story collection Neighbors. Tayari Jones wrote the intro for that book. Diane Oliver no longer with us, so we wanted to talk to somebody who could speak to the beauty of her work. And Tayari Jones, who is herself a creative writing and literature professor down there at Emory. It was a beautiful conversation even then about Diane Oliver and her work and how Tayari discovered her. So she's wonderful talking about the craft of writing. She's wonderful talking about her discipline and the choices that she makes and why she makes them. And I just want to say one more thing, because we just did Allegra Goodman's this Is Not About Us. And there's such a stark contrast between these two books, and yet I think they are both so incredibly good. This Is Not About Us comes across almost like effortless, like she just writes this funny, sort of touching, heartfelt short storybook. This book speaks to craft. It speaks to amazing editing, incredible writing, sentence, crafting thought behind every choice. This speaks to great literature. It feels like Tayari Jones worked incredibly hard on the novel, but it doesn't feel heavy or burdened. It's just a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. I cannot recommend it enough. And you were the one who read it first.
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C
I think I did. And I thought, this is really special as I was reading it. And as I said to her, I have this image. I always have an image when I'M reading a book of the author and what she's doing or he's doing, how they're doing it, et cetera. And I have the feeling that she basically crafts every sentence, because when you get down to the granular level of this book, there are sentences, as I said to her, that make me stop and think, read the sentence again and again, and then put the book down for a few minutes just to think about what I just saw.
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Yeah.
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This book is meticulously crafted. It's like beautifully blown glass or an incredibly sewn quilt. It's an amazing piece of craftsmanship, this book.
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C
So let's get to our conversation. This is Tayari Jones talking to us about Kin K I N. Tayari Jones. It's great to have. Great to have you back in the bookcase. The new book is Kin. Both Katie and I loved it. Other members of the family have read it. They all love it. I want to start with talking to you as the professor that you are at Emory teaching English literature and teaching creative writing. If Kin were on your course syllabus, how would you teach it? And what do you want your students to take from it?
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Ooh, that's a hard question. I can't even imagine. I'm mortified at the idea of teaching my own work. But I think if I were teaching it, I would probably situate regionally. I would situate it as Southern literature because I do feel that the urban south is underrepresented in our understanding of the South. I always say people think Southern literature is about grandmothers and mules, and we do have grandmothers in this book, but no mules. So I would kind of think about this. We would probably talk, if it was a literature class, about the questions of migration, people moving from the small towns in the south to the larger cities, because people always think about Southerners, particularly black Southerners, as migrating to the urban areas in the North. And so this idea of people who wanted a bigger city life but want it to stay in the South.
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B
So was that the initial seed for you wanting to explore a story that took place that way, or was there a character? Was it Niecy that bit you or Annie that bit you that wouldn't let go? What was the hook for you that caught you on the line?
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This is a crazy story in that, this book. Kin is not the book I was contracted to write. I was supposed to be writing a novel about gentrification in modern day Atlanta.
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B
Okay, so you're right. Right.
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I see that in this.
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C
Yeah. Right.
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Yeah. And so I was trying to write that story. And, I mean, it's the perfect story for me to write. I've moved back to Atlanta. I live in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. The emotional question I was looking at was, can you gentrify your own neighborhood? Can you gentrify your own hometown? Which is a question I ask myself daily. So I thought, well, let me ask myself in fiction. And I was trying to write the book, and it wasn't happening. It felt like I was busy with, like, a hammer and nails, a saw, and I was making a racket, but I wasn't making art. It's like I was making noise when I should have been making music. And I finally just gave up and took out a pencil and a piece of paper. Not even a pen, a piece of paper. And I just started doodling just to see what do I have in my mind? Is there anything in there? And I met Annie and Niecy, and I saw that they were living in the 50s, and I thought, oh, that's so strange. Well, perhaps these are the parents of my real characters, because I have many things, but a historical novelist is not one of them. But after I got about 100 and something pages in, I realized that what I thought was backstory was the story.
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B
So this was in some ways a We say, you know, some writers are planners and some writers are fly by the seat of their pants. So it sounds like this was a seat of the pants book.
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A
I always. I never outline, I never know the end of a story, but I do know what the story is. You know, historically, at least, I have known what the story is. This is the first time that a story like, you know, you hear all those writers being like, you don't choose the story, the story chooses you. I never believed that. I thought those people were just trying to seem interesting. And then it happened to me. A story chose me.
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C
This is so much about mothers. One of my favorite quotes in the book is, we were all also fatherless, but this didn't bite. The same way when you don't have your mother, you don't really know who you are. Even if you have a bad mother like Baby Doll Head, you can use her to know what you are not. First of all, mother child relationships are so important and so often mined by novelists. But did you have in your mind that that was going to be your principal theme that you wanted to explore that?
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Because I went into this project with no planning, I did not have it in mind. But it developed as time went on, and it's this idea of compulsory mothering. But also, you know, every book I write, I make a wink to Toni Morrison in some way. And you know that famous Morrison story where the two girls are living in the foster home and one of them's mother is dead and the other mother danced all night or danced too much. But they're both motherless, but in very different ways. And so when I realized that Annie and Vernice had. These were differently motherless, because Vernice's mother, you know, is dead. Vernice knows she'll never see her again, on this side, at least. And Annie wakes up every day hoping to be reunited with her mother and goes to bed every night disappointed. And I was wondering which of them is the lucky one.
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B
I want to go back to something you said before. I'm just writing a note so I don't say it wrong. You said before that you knew when you were writing the novel you were contracted for, that you were making noise when you were writing Kin, and when you were writing in general. How do you know you're making music and not noise?
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Oh, just know the characters feel like. Not like they're leading you, but like you all are walking together. I've never had. Well, this, this time, I felt like I was following the characters, where usually I feel like I'm walking with the characters and I feel like I know them. They surprise me, just as people, you know, in real life can surprise you. But when they do surprise you, you understand why, like, when a friend of yours does something surprising, once you're over the shock, you can kind of connect the dots and see why she did that. And that's how it feels when the novel is, you know, like my students would say, when the book is booking, that's how you know. Or even if you have friends who are musicians, you know, they say, oh, the band was swinging, or the band wasn't swinging. And if you were sitting there, you could tell if the band was swinging. You can't say why, but you felt a kind of contagious energy from it. And I think that is the case for when the book is booking.
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C
TAYARI I I this continues to amaze me when authors say to me, the character surprises me because, darn it, the character is you. You're creating it. You're the person who is, as Sue Miller said to all my characters are my employees. Well, you're the person creating the character, so when it goes off in some direction you don't expect, you're the one who's going off in that direction. Well, that amazes me.
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They may be your employees, but I think about the people whose employee I have been. They're not in charge of me. They just pay me. But I think that the best way I can explain this is. Have you ever told a lie? Yes.
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C
You have? Never.
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And when you're telling the lie, you tell the general lie. You know, the dog ate my homework or whatever. And then you embroider it. It was a big dog. It had on a collar. And I couldn't believe it ate my homework because I had just seen it eat a bowl of kibble that belonged to the poodle around the corner. And the poodle was mad. You see, it just builds as you go. And you can even see it with your students. If you have them, they'll be lying to you, right? They'll be, like, all into it.
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C
The.
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The lie is lying, right? Like, the lie is swinging. And they can tell when they've taken the lie someplace. It doesn't make sense, and they have to back it up, and they go another direction. They did not plan that lie. They're following that lie. And in many ways, fiction is the lie. You're making it up as you go. And the details you provided build on for other details. So like, when I say the dog ate the kibble that was meant for the poodle around the corner, then that opens my mind up right now to say, well, who owned the poodle around the corner? I was surprised that the pool around the corner belonged to a very large man. It was such a small dog. But my mother said when his wife left him, the only thing she left him with was that little dog. So he cares for it. And he will not let another woman in that house because she. He thinks she might mistreat the dog. You see, I just came up with that, and that's how fiction works.
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B
That was a little terrifying in a way. So you want to sit down? You think when you get. When these characters start talking to you, you think, okay, I'm not a historical novelist, so they're probably going to be the parents. When did these two stories become first person for you? Like, did you start by writing them with the third person? And you were just writing the story, and then you decided, no, I'm going to split it into two perspectives and make it first person. Like, what was that process like for you?
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It was. It was originally Vernice's first person. I like first person. I feel like first people. I like first person. I enjoy voice. Sometimes I switch it up sometimes just to show that I can. But I because I do believe the most radical thing you can do in a story is change point of view. So when I decided that I only decide to use a second point of view if there is something I want to know that the original point of view cannot reveal. And I will try every way I can to see if I can make it work with the point of view I have. One of the things I tell my students is that every story or novel has to be at a certain budget. You have a budget and different things you choose to do cost money out of your budget. Like every new character costs you money out of your budget. So you have to decide is this, can I use my existing characters or do I need to hire another character? And now if your story is under budget, it's boring. You don't have enough characters or not doing enough stuff. Like coincidences are expensive. That's why you can't have too many. But. But if your story is over budget, if you have too many coincidences, too many points of view, too many settings, scenes, it's over budget and it's too busy and the reader can't keep up. So switching point of view is expensive and I only do if it is 100% necessary.
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C
So we'll break for a moment and come back with some more talk with Tayari Jones. One of the things she had a very successful novel, as Kate mentioned a number of years ago, an American marriage in and she says she learned from that many of the advantages of success and the disadvantages of success. We asked her about it. You'll hear that when our conversation continues.
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From 30 for 30 podcasts. Did you say someone got shot?
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C
Brian Patter seems senior defensive lineman from Miami gunned down. The key to this case. It's Brian. An hour before he died, he was on the phone arguing with somebody.
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A
This might be a hit.
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C
You want the truth, they just want a conviction. Being placed under arrest. We had a killer amongst us. Murder at the U Listen now with
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Verbo Care, help is always ready before, during and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind.
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C
Sometimes when you're reading a book, you're reading it because you enjoy it and it's going along and you're having fun and the characters are interesting. And sometimes you read a book and think, this is literature. This is really good literature. And when I'm in a book like that and I was with kin, I think about the revision process. Every sentence in this book, it seems to me, has a richness to it. When I was reading this, I would often go back and reread a sentence and then stop and put the book down because the sentence needed to be thought about for some period of time. And I'm wondering, when you do revisions, is it really granular? And are you working on it sentence by sentence and not satisfied until you have that sentence crafted in the way you want it?
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A
I want my sentences to be right. I want them to be right, and I want them to be. I want my sentences to be interesting. I like it because here's the thing with this story, Ken. It's a very kind of classic story. It's almost like, you know, when you go to a restaurant and you order the creme brulee. Creme brulee is basic dessert, but a good chef can make a spectacular creme brulee, even though it's one of the most basic desserts. Or the yellow cake with the chocolate frosting, very basic. But a good pastry chef can show out with that dessert. This is a very, very classic story. Two friends. Lives diverge, but their friendship stays intact. And there's a tragedy. Very basic story. So if you're going to have. If you're not going to show off with plot, you have to make it happen with sentence.
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B
Do you actually. You did some serious foreshadowing in the book.
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A
So I had these things, and I felt like these were checks I had written that had not yet cleared the bank of story. I don't know why I use these money metaphors. I think it's because I teach, and it's really easy for me to explain it to my students that way. And so. But I didn't know how to. It was going to go down. As a matter of fact, the first draft, I killed entirely different people, really. And I gave it to my editor, and she said to me, she said, when this happens, as a reader, I think my. That's unfortunate. But, you know, you don't go 300 pages to say that's unfortunate. You go 300 pages to be devastated. And she said, you were protecting yourself, and you're not serving the story. So I said, I went home. I said, I wrote her a letter. I said, okay, I'm gonna go home, I'm gonna raise the dead, and I'm gonna kill somebody. I'll keep you posted. And so that's what I did. I went home and I raised the dead. I picked him back up and dusted him off and let him walk around and I had to do this other thing. And I knew. I knew it was gonna be painful to me. I knew it was gonna be something I did not want to see or do, but for the emotional truth of the story. And that's how I knew it was over, too. Like when I. Because even when I had killed the wrong person, I kept thinking about the story. When I'm done with the book, I don't think about it anymore. That's why I never write a sequel. I feel like. If I feel like I need to write a sequel, then I obviously didn't finish the book. So I went back to it, and I just did what had to be done. And I. Oh, I just cried. Oh, I cried.
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C
I read that you got sick.
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A
I did.
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C
While you were writing this novel. Tell me about that.
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I got suddenly. Well, both suddenly and gradually sick. I started feeling weird, Like I have a pretty handwriting, if I may say so myself. I am a Southern girl, and I did take that penmanship very seriously. And I was signing books, and my signature was ugly, and I was confused by that. And then I just started getting sicker and sicker. Like, my right leg wasn't really working. I couldn't. I fell out in Zumba class. I was so. They wouldn't allow me to come back to Zumba until I had been seen by a doctor. Like, it was all of this. And it turned out that I had a mysterious autoimmune disorder. And I was off of work for six months. And it really wrecked my vision, which is why I'm wearing glasses now. I. I was just so. I had never really been sick. And I was so sick and had to have surgery. I had to have radiation. I mean, it was just. It took over the idea of the fragility of the body. Took over my life and. But it did help me write, Ken, because the story kept me company. I had to put on an eye patch because my vision was just shot. And I had to put on an eyepatch because I was having trouble, you know, seeing double. And I wrote this book. You know, I'm up here looking like Captain Hook. And I had to use the. The computer. You know, I'm a typewriter girl, but I had to use the computer. Cause I just wasn't well enough to spend all the time that using a typewriter takes. And the people, the characters kept me company throughout my recovery.
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B
God, I love this book.
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C
Yeah.
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A
You know, I'm really fond of it myself. I'm very proud of it. I am. I feel. I feel. You know, I Didn't think I could have another. I worried that I didn't have another book in me. After An American Marriage, I felt like I had this big successful book. I know other people who are just as talented, perhaps more so, and they never had a successful book. And so who am I to ask for anything more? You know, there are people who long to write one book and I had written four. Who was I to ask for a fifth? It really messed with my head. It wasn't even that I felt like an imposter. I just felt greedy, you know, like, I felt like the resources are finite and I don't. I just, you know, I wasn't raised to. To try to eat the whole cake. You know, I wanted to leave some for someone else. It's really how I felt. I just felt like this is rude. It just seemed untoward. Ambition seemed untoward. So these are all the kinds of questions and then, you know, issues of success. Because one thing I did learn with the success of an American marriage, I learned what success is and what success isn't. I learned what success can do and what it can't do. And that's. So these are all like lessons that are in your head when you're trying to write and you have to just. I think that being sick, I didn't worry about any of those things. I was writing again the way I did when I was a child, just for pleasure of story.
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B
Tyra, obviously writers have different definitions of success. But you were successful after An American Marriage. Hugely successful. Oprah picked that as her book club pick for that month. And I wonder if that success puts pressure on you moving forward.
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A
Like, I keep a journal of gratitude and I'm always grateful for my house because before an American Marriage, I was living on the top floor of an owner occupied brownstone. I lived on the top of old lady's house. I would have to pass through her place to get up to my place. And now I have a home I think is comfortable. It's just. I call it my little nest. And I'm able to live here easily and I'm able to help my parents when they need help. And. And that to me is what success is giving. It's giving me comfort and it has given me a kind of respect of my peers and that I enjoy. But what I believe success cannot do, I think of like life as like a series of cups. This is just one. Here's another one. Okay, so like, this is the success cup. This is the family cup. You know, there's a health cup Each cup can only hold so much. So you can only fill the success cup with success. You can't take from the success cup and pour it into the health cup, you see? So it can only do what it does. The downside of success is that it makes you lonely because there's so few people that have it. And so you're having experiences that other people that, you know, they can't really. You can't. There are things you can't talk about with other people. They won't understand why you find it to be a problem or it seems. It seems almost rude to talk about and, you know, like. So that is a downside. It's so success is very isolating.
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C
Tayari Jones, it is such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. You are fun. You're just fun to talk to. I hate fun as an adjective, but it applies here.
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A
It is always a pleasure and we should hang out in real life.
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B
Rapid fire questions for Tayari Jones. What is your favorite book to teach on your syllabus and why?
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A
I really like. Ooh, ever. You know, I really like to. If I'm teaching a novel class, I like to teach Song with Solomon by Toni Morrison because everything that happens in that novel is winked at in the first chapter, but you don't even notice it until you finish the book.
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C
As I was reading Ken, you mentioned Toni Morrison. As I was reading Ken, I kept thinking, there's a Toni Morrison influence.
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A
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I just think it's rude to write a novel and not tip your hat, at least to the great queen mother.
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B
What do you use as a bookmark?
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A
A bookmark. I use. I make them. I watercolor things. I watercolor bookmarks. Do you really? I do. I learned.
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B
So organized.
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A
I. I.
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B
Cause my. Me, I don't. I like. I'm like, oh, there's my electric bill. And then I'm like, where's my electric.
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A
Oh, my lights went out. Well, you know, I. I learned to watercolor on actually on January 21, 2025. Yeah, 2025, because I needed to do something that would distract me from the news. And when you do something that you don't know how to do, you can't worry and do it at the same time because you're learning.
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C
Do you turn down the edge of a page?
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A
No. No, that's illegal.
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C
Do you take margin notes?
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A
I do. I do.
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C
Talk about illegal.
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A
Well, I was going to say, so
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B
you don't fold down the pages, but you write in the margin. So you're Like a selective book. Criminal.
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A
No, no. Writing in the margin is. I am that my margin. That's annotation, writing, folding down the pace. That's just destructive and lazy.
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C
So what are the courses that you teach?
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A
You know, I just teach creative writing now. Now that I'm in Emory, I teach. I like to teach advanced creative writing. That's my favorite. And I'll teach intermediate. I cannot teach beginners because I don't understand. I don't know how to talk about the thing. The things that you would learn in a beginner class. The things. I know more from intuition. And so I don't teach to beginners very well.
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C
One of the constant complaints I get from friends who are professors or who teach in high school that their kids can't write. Do you find that there is real nascent talent in the kids you're working with?
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A
My kids are good. I don't know what kind of kids these other people have. No, my kids are great. They're creative. They're friendly to one another. They're, you know, because the works we do it workshop style. And I always tell them our goal is to leave each person inspired to write another draft. So they are kind to each other, and they're pretty good writers. Every now and then I'll get a student and I'm like, holy moly, that kid is good. But I do love the kids. I love my students. And now that I'm the age I am, I'm 55, so I'm about the age of their moms. So therefore, now I can kind of love on them in a way that doesn't undermine, like, the authority of the classroom. Because I'm old. Like, when I was a young teacher, I had to make sure I kept that boundary really hard. But now, you know, the last day, whoever someone's graduating, you know, I get them a gift, and I make all the others sign a card for them. I don't know, I just love them.
- [28:43]
B
One of the great things about this job is when we've had a great conversation with an author, after we sign off, we just call each other and go, oh, my God, wasn't that so much fun? Fun, yeah, exactly. And that's a conversation we had right after Tayari Jones. And I think also we may have mentioned that my father would run away with her if she was willing and both of you weren't, you know, taken. But I can't recommend this book enough. As I say, it is meticulously crafted. It requires thought. This is not a surface read. You really have to get down to the bottom of her words, but you will be so glad that you did. Kin by Tayari Jones. An amazing, amazing book and I'm so pleased she said.
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C
I'd like to hang out with you guys. So when we're down in Atlanta, we'll take her out to lunch. Here's the people who make this podcast possible and then a final thought from Tayari Jones.
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B
The book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode Description
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A
Writers do not have to write every day that when you tell people they have to write every day, you're discouraging the people who have the most to say. These are the people who work. These are the people who raise kids. These are the people who are doing elder care. These are the people who are saving the world. And those are the stories I want to read. I don't want to read a book by someone who sits in their pajamas every day writing. I don't want to read anyone's pajama book. I want to read the book by the people whose lives are meaningful and therefore their work will be meaningful.