I think part of writing is about that negotiation with homelessness and placelessness. A New Yorker is as close as I get to having a national identity.

When you’re writing from a place that isn’t home, do you welcome the interruptions to your rhythm or do you seek it back?Ī place that isn’t home… I think that so much of writing is about a way of trying to make home, and I often think of this in terms of national identity. I’m actually delighted that she had such an impassioned reaction to it.” I’m glad people read it and they feel that there’s something important at stake. I read it so many times, and the first two times I read it, I hated it.” I thought, “Wow. An anthropologist of Africa said, “I read that book. I mean, it’s a 500 year swath of history, and I’m trying to inhabit that swath. I think that it’s certainly Ghana specific, but the larger frame is about these issues of memory, the afterlife of slavery, and what are the forms of narrative that are commensurate to trying to tell an impossible history. Have you had conversations with readers of Lose Your Mother about their own travels to Ghana?

I didn’t realize how difficult or challenging that project would prove to be until I had been in Ghana for a year. I think I was probably trying to run away from the possible reception or failure of Scenes, so I started research on a new project. I had a Fulbright and wanted to write about memory and slavery in a comparative frame. How soon after your first book, Scenes of Subjection (1997), did you begin researching and writing your next, Lose Your Mother (2007)?Ī week after Scenes came out, I was on a plane to Ghana.

When writing I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with, or that I’m writing against. I am very committed to a storied articulation of ideas, but working with concepts as building blocks enables me to think about situation and character as well as my own key terms. I think of my work as bridging theory and narrative. Sometimes that means there are things that I think I’m going to write about that I actually can’t write about once I encounter the particular material, or sometimes it just takes me in a direction that I wasn’t expecting to go in at all. I think partly it’s because of the way I engage archival materials. I have an impression of the kind of thing I might want to do, and that’s very clear, as opposed to having a full outline of the book. I work intuitively and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. Outlining may be too formal a description. What is your outlining process like when starting a book?

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