Novelists From The United States

"The character doesn’t have to be exactly like them, but as an author you have to give something to the reader that shows the vulnerability and where the character’s coming from…You can have characters do awful things, but you make them relatable or have some kind of backstory that makes their actions, even if it’s not excusable, understandable…"

"I think that when you’re a teen, you can be overwhelmed with change. You’re expected to be ready for adulthood, to know what you want to do with the rest of your life, to have mature relationships. But it’s only been like 2.5 years since you had braces, or got your period, or stopped playing with Barbies! So I think it’s easy to retreat into apathy and fear and to not try. Because trying means you can fail and be embarrassed—and those are two things that are literally the worst when you’re in high school…"

"Recently the things that I’ve enjoyed reading are writers from Africa, like Maaza Mengiste, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These are people who are doing brilliantly well I think, and in both of those cases, they’ve just published their second novels. So very early in their writing careers."

"who is to judge what makes a "real African"? It is almost impossible to apply a single identity to an entire racial or ethnic group, much less to an entire continent. As individuals, we are each comprised of a series of contradictions. We are not neatly constructed sets of qualities. At our best, we should defy simple categorisation. It is living with difficult choices and easy accommodations that makes us human and, if we're lucky, keeps us interesting. It is from within contradictory existences that some of our greatest works of literature have been born."

"It seems that every new writer with any remote connection to the continent of Africa, either willingly or unwillingly, has first to wrestle with this question of identity before talking about what should matter most: their book...we should focus on the ability of the story to immerse us so fully in the world that has been constructed, that it feels a bit like home."

"Maybe we have to allow our discomfort as another consequence of the violence depicted. Our shared confusion and disgust can bind us to those who are suffering, rather than draw us away from them. They too have had to witness. To deny our own human reactions makes it easier to deny the humanity of those who are photographed. Though we cannot change what has happened, we can alter the symbolism attached to the images. Photographs can be more than a reminder of cruelty and the inevitable aftermath of war. There are narratives unfolding right now in South Sudan, in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo that can be rewritten. We have the ability to strip away what we’re supposed to see – just another African victim – and gaze upon what we should: a human being. But first, we have to look."

"I like ghosts as a metaphor for the outsider. I wish they were real; that would be my preferred afterlife plan. I'd love to observe and haunt with little involvement—I guess that's what being a writer is."

"We have a really shamefully horrid healthcare system, and I think that’s part of it. It’s much more convenient to think these people are just crazy, or it’s in their heads. It’s a very real thing; I don’t know of anyone who doubts it any more. Occasionally I encounter people that do. I’m astounded at their wilful ignorance; it’s not actual ignorance."

"When I first started writing, it was much more important for me to appeal to academic audiences or an imagined high-art literary audience. The older I get, the more important it is for me to communicate with everyone and anyone. Right now to me, America is in a crisis of constant misunderstandings. Some of it is willful ignorance, but some of it is not willful and it requires people to explain things…"

"Estrangement is a constant theme in all of my work. The thing that makes it really difficult is people will look at me and not understand why I feel like an outsider, or why I couldn’t belong in all kind of circumstances. I’m one of those people who visually presents as whoever you want—whatever ethnicity or race is predominant. For me, the challenge is always figuring out what people’s assumptions are, and how I can actually take up space against their assumptions. Because they’re almost always wrong about who I am. That’s a hard thing to get used to in America…"

"Fantasy and science fiction novels are metaphors for our world. If a speculative book looks at our world through the eyes of a marginalized person, white readers might not connect with that character, because they haven’t faced racism. They’re not excited by a plot where black and brown characters must fight white oppressors, because they have to see themselves as the villain rather than the hero. They see a main character that doesn’t look like them, and without quite knowing why, they don’t find the story relatable…"

"People of color face mass incarceration and execution and racism and systematic oppression, taking away so many of our chances to use our talents and abilities as well."

"Because I write contemporary, magical realism and speculative for both children and adults, I spend a lot of time thinking about real settings for the contemporary books and the pieces that could be taken from those places to create fantasy spaces. But I also like to look for the magic in the real world…"

"There are people who would be able to do the same if they’d been given the same privileges as me. I think of how, in our society, so many of us like to consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. We tell ourselves that we would’ve been better than our ancestors: We would’ve fought slavery, fought internment and concentration camps, stopped genocide. Yet these are all things that are happening in the world right now, and I feel a helplessness and hopelessness…"

"There is no war that does not impact the lives of children, so children and what happens to them in migration or conflict are important to me, and we generally don’t hear enough about it. And it’s difficult because they don’t know yet how to express their perspectives very well, so I’m interested in that, how their vocabulary doesn’t yet capture what they are seeing and feeling. As a writer, that becomes an interesting vehicle through which to tell a story."

"What is profound about fiction is that it creates a place where we can imagine the possible futures of these kinds of movements. Those are the kinds of questions we have to ask as writers."

"I think what writing should be at its essence is a creative expression, it should be informed by the needs of the story, by the dictates of your characters…I feel like I can write any character I want—an African, a European, a writer can do anything, it just has to feel true to the story."

"I think fiction gives us a door into what is actually happening around us. There are those who don’t trust fiction, they will read history or biography, but they don’t understand that those forms of narrative are also constructed."

"Fiction gives me the right to do it. It's not an autobiography. I did have the right to tell this story. My position is that you write from the place that you are, and it's not a detriment, and it's not something that undermines any kind of authenticity. I had to understand very early on that I'm writing this book as an American, with very, very strong ties to Ethiopia—and a deep love, my family is there—but ultimately, I am writing it with an American way of looking at things. That doesn't mean that the story is not authentic. Or then you have to question what "authentic" means…"

"part of what I’ve realized with this [second] book is that creativity is always about running against and into yourself. In every way. (2017)"

"What is war? You send soldiers out and, although nobody wants to say it, you know a certain number will be killed, and you hope there will be fewer than the casualties on the other side. War is dealing with human beings as objects. (2017)"

"I write fiction that revolves around archival research and historical events. What I search for in documented history: what happened, is not necessarily what I seek when I write it down: what was it like, and what was left out. I go back to something Breyten Breytenbach once told me, that fiction tells a truth that history cannot. I lean into fictive truths."

"Some of my favorite writers are those who break form. I wanted to see if I could do that under their tutelage. I’m really proud of being able to combine the stories of the Ethiopians and the Italians, to force questions about both of them, about loyalty, about racism, about being subjugated by the very people who should be protecting you. These were the questions I wanted to bring forward."

"Part of my concern in this book was to center the story on people who are often not written about in history—the farmers, the peasants, the servants who don’t have the social standing to make them newsworthy—because the stories that get remembered are so often about people who are already famous or noteworthy."

"It was not until a revolution tore my country apart that I began to understand how war could render decent people unrecognisable. Only when I had felt real terror did I begin to comprehend the many ways that conflict can devour us without spilling a drop of blood. (2020)"

"in many ways, Ethiopia is an oral culture., I spent a lot of time listening to stories and histories told around dinner tables or in the sitting room. The stories my grandfather would tell were often about the Italo-Ethiopian wars, both the first and the second, and also life lessons. Those stories of my grandfather's really informed how I viewed-history, how I viewed Ethiopia; what it meant to be Ethiopian. Those were my books, the stories that I learned. When I think back to the stories that I would hear, especially when my parents would tell stories, that cadence in which they told them, and the momentum they had while telling it, that's something I am always trying to emulate in my writing. So I count them as an influence as much as anything that I've read."

"She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a word lost forever."

"These aren't the days to pretend you're only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We're more than this."

"What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else."

"She is afraid of crumbling and disappearing, of being taken and being left behind at the same time: a body tumbling between hands while dying inside."

"He is doing as she once did, in the naïve belief that what is buried stays that way, that what is hidden will stay unseen, that what is yours will remain always in your possession. He is being foolish."

"My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers."

"Who remembers what to do? she asks. Who remembers what it means to be more than what this world believes of us?"

"Make living your act of defiance. Record it all."

"We all know that war destroys mankind, and in spite of their differences in race, creed, and religion, women all across the world despise war because its fruit is nothing but destruction."

"The routine dulls the terror."

"What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once."

"Here is the truth he wants to ignore: that what is forged into memory tucks itself into bone and muscle. It will always be there and it will follow us to the grave."

"She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones."

"She once told me that because I am lighter-skinned than her I would be treated better, and then the divorce from my father, I think she felt betrayed by whiteness in a certain kind of way, and I represent that whiteness."

"And then she said and I have Rebecca, you know? Sort of the idea is I was delightful, and she said I was delightful, but in the context you could see I was a calamity nonetheless. I mean I think there was a real ambivalence about the role of children in lives of independent, thinking women. And what was transmitted to me was not that being a mom was the worst possible choice, but that it could definitely be a serious hindrance. And that there were other things worth pursuing more."

"…Within the range of YA books that feature LGBT main characters, there are many more books about gay boys than girls, and transgender characters are the least represented. I would encourage librarians who acquire books for their libraries to remember that LGBT includes four letters that represent four very different experiences. Because there are fewer books about queer girls and trans characters, you have to look harder to find them, to ensure that lesbian, bisexual, or trans students can also have the benefit of diving into a fictional world starring people like them."

"…it’s very important to remember that simply because a book has queer characters does not mean that only queer people can read them. I’m an Asian American lesbian, and I’m capable of enjoying books about straight white people. It works the other way around, too."

"I wanted to be a writer because I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s the one thing that has been a constant my entire life, so there is no why; it simply is."

"Their take on me was, 'Look, you're not afraid you will be gassed, you're not drinking out of the coloured water fountain; you've got it really good,' so they didn't really understand that being biracial and the child of divorce would affect me in the way it did."

"…I would have been a much better-adjusted adult earlier on if I’d read a single book about real queer people when I was growing up."

"You are my first love.” And then, “You will be my only love."

"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."

"Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself."

"I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two."