Tayari's Blog: Swan Song For Leaving Atlanta

My hostess, Jennifer Griffith, warned me as we walked across campus. “You never know how many people are going to show up.” I told her that I understood, that I’d read to groups as small as three. “It will be fine.”

We rounded the corner and found each seat in the 200-seat auditorium filled, a full fifteen minutes before the event was scheduled to begin. By noon, there were students lining the stairs and sitting in cross-legged clumps on the floor. Each person held a well thumbed copy of Leaving Atlanta. As I read aloud, I looked out at the audience thinking: This is my hometown. These are my folks.

At the end of the reading there was a delightful Q&A—smart thoughtful questions, not without humor. And then, a woman on the left side of the room raised her hand. She spoke with emotion about being a child in Atlanta. (She was only a few years younger than me.) Leaving Atlanta, she said, was something that she could share with her own daughter, to explain the world as it is now and as it was in 1979. As she thanked me for my work, it was all I could do to keep from cutting her off – I owed her my thanks, for her generous words, for bringing me back home, and reminding me why I wanted to write about Atlanta, why I wanted to write at all.

In many ways, publishing a novel is like sending a letter in a bottle. You cast it to the waves, having no idea where it will end up. Speaking at Clayton State this afternoon was like walking along the beach and stumbling across another bottle, the letter corked inside a loving reply to the one I’d launched, scared and hopeful, more than three years ago.