I think it’s important for fiction to show the breadth of the world we live in ― positive, negative and in between. Do you think it’s important that fiction covers issues like these? Your books cover lots of different issues: in Lies We Tell Ourselves it was all to do with integration in the US and in What We Left Behind it’s being part of the LGBTQ+ community. Now, I do both ― I still work in nonprofit communications, and I also get to live my dream of being a fiction writer.
It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and working in communications for a civil rights nonprofit organisation that I decided to try writing again. As a teenager, though, I started to think writing wasn’t practical as a career goal.
Up until about age 12, my dream was to be a novelist. Have you always wanted to be a writer or was it more of a spontaneous thing for you?īoth! I grew up loving reading and writing.
But I liked two of the characters in it, Toni and Gretchen, so much that I decided to write an entirely separate book exploring what happened to them when they started university. I’d actually written about the main characters of WWLB in another book that I didn’t wind up finishing. It was inspired by the characters themselves. My new book, What We Left Behind (WWLB), started out very differently. They were both in high school when their schools were integrated for the first time, and as we talked about their experiences, I started wondering what it might’ve been like to be on the front lines of such a major public civil rights battle ― being a black girl entering a previously all-white school ― while also dealing with a private battle ― knowing that you were gay in the completely unaccepting society that was the United States in the 1950s. Thank you! Lies We Tell Ourselves was originally inspired by my parents’ experiences growing up in Virginia in the 1960s.
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