her books, in her own words
The Untelling
This is a novel which I wrote three times before I finally got it right. Each time, I'd finish a draft, I would sit back and say, "That's it. I'm finished." But the story still gnawed at me. One thing I have learned about writing stories, if the characters are still haunting me, then I am not finished yet. Deadlines came and deadlines went, but the story wasn't yet complete, there was some clasp that was not yet fastened, some string left dangling. So I returned to my writing table again and again until the book was finished.
Show Tayari's Reflection on The Untelling
Sometimes I wonder if this novel was so hard to write because this time, the subject matter is family and the challenges of this story are questions of courage and forgiveness. For me, kinship has always been a baffling concept which has become more baffling as I have become a woman, contemplating the idea of my own family. Forgiveness has not been my strong suit either. I am not exaggerating when I say that I until quite recently, I still held a grudge against a second grade teacher who did me wrong. So, in order to write a book about forgiveness, I had to figure out how to forgive. To write about family, I had to embrace my own relatives. And to write about courage, I had to learn to be brave.
Aria Jackson, the main character of this book, is a black women whose life isn’t turning out quite the way that she had hoped. Writing her character was difficult. I kept wanting to take the easy way out—to make her an exceptional person, a role model on paper. But instead, I worked hard to be honest, to keep her true to what I know about human nature: that we are all vulnerable; that we lie and feel bad about it; and that many of the terrible things that happen to us are not our fault. Like all of us, Aria wants what she cannot have. She is more wounded that she would ever admit. But like all of us, she has the tools to change her life. The only question is whether she will be brave enough to try.
Leaving Atlanta
I was almost nine years old when the bodies of fourteen-year-old Edward Smith and thirteen-year-old Alfred Adams were discovered in Atlanta, beginning the official investigation of what became known as "The Atlanta Child Murders." Over the course of the next two years, at least twenty more African American children were murdered. Two of them were students at my elementary school.
Show Tayari's Reflection on Leaving Atlanta
People often ask me if my childhood was stolen. I tell them no, but I don't think that they believe me. Maybe after reading Leaving Atlanta, they will. I wrote this novel to make a record of how life was for those of us who were too young to understand the complicated social and political landscape of Atlanta, the "city too busy to hate." Those of us on the playground didn't know that in 1979 Atlanta was the only city in the country that could boast of having a black mayor, police chief, and school board president. We had no idea that we were the heirs of the civil rights movements. When children's bodies were found strewn in wooded areas, creeks, and dumpsters, most of us had no knowledge of the history of lynching in the American south. What we knew were the things that mattered to us as children. Like all other children, we worried that we wouldn't be accepted by our peers, we fretted that our parents might divorce, but we also worried that a faceless predator might murder us.
During my freshman year at Spelman College, an eight-year-old boy didn't show up as scheduled for tutoring. I panicked, scouring the campus, shouting his name and asking everyone if they had seen a little boy with jug-ears. Some people simply indicated that they hadn't seen him but others put down their notebooks, abandoned their boyfriends and helped me look. I soon realized something about everyone who helped me-- the young women who looked under bushes, placed desperate calls to public safety, and retraced the route from the bus stop to the campus gates. We were all Atlanta natives. We remembered.
As the survivors, we have a responsibility to tell the story. James Baldwin wrote about the murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Toni Cade Bambara's opus, Those Bones are Not My Child also revisits this difficult period in Atlanta's history. But the time had come for someone of my generation, to tell the tale from the vantage point of the playground. This novel is a memorial to twenty-nine (or more) who did not survive and it the testimony of the thousands who will never forget.