JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For many of us, the family we choose for ourselves is just as significant - perhaps even more so - than the one that we're born into. And that's the case for the group of Black women at the center of Angela Flournoy's new novel "The Wilderness."
ANGELA FLOURNOY: You know, when we talk about chosen family, it's not that you chose them once and you're stuck with them. The thing about people not related to you is that you tend to have these moments where you have to keep choosing. You have to keep choosing. Whether it's 'cause you move away or because your lives are just sort of diverging, you have to keep choosing to be a part of this friendship.
SUMMERS: The book traces the lives of four friends, Desiree, Nakia, Monique and January. They change and grow over the course of two decades, recommitting to each other as they enter different stages of adulthood. There's also a key relationship Desiree can't recommit to after we first meet her. It's the relationship with her biological sister. Angela Flournoy told me why she explored the dynamics of deep bonds and estrangement in this book.
FLOURNOY: I've always been interested - kind of alongside the deep, like, decades-long friendships and connections, I've also been interested in the ways that people just cut family members off. So I wanted to think about the beginnings and what it feels like to have a kind of rupture with someone you love, or you grew up loving, and for it to kind of just bloom into this insurmountable distance between the two of you. And so that is another - in addition to these friendships, there's this fifth person, this fifth woman, Danielle, who's Desiree's sister, who kind of is on the margins of the story for much of the story because they are not in communication, the two of them.
SUMMERS: Yeah. So there are the sisters, Desiree and Danielle, but there are also several other women who are part of this group of friends, this chosen family, who have loved and grown up along each other over the years. What is important for us to know about them?
FLOURNOY: I would say that the things that are important to know about them is that they are people who have experienced really the same things to different levels and from different sides - the last 20 years of American life that we've all experienced. That is the - you know, the positives and the not so positives. And they - it has really shaped them in very particular ways. Just being here - being in the cities that they live in, which is Los Angeles and New York, in different periods of time, but also being on the internet that we live, you know, with - maybe we live on too much...
SUMMERS: Right.
FLOURNOY: ...How it has shaped them. There was a period of time when I thought I was going to title this novel "The Millennials," kind of being a little cheeky, but also sticking a flag in a demographic that people don't necessarily associate with, you know, Black women. But I thought that a lot of their experiences, though there's - certainly there's a lot that's particular to them just being Black, a lot of it also has to do with them coming of age in the late 2000s after the housing crisis and recession and growing alongside social media. There's a lot that is very particular to when they came of age that colors their experiences in the novel.
SUMMERS: What led you to change the title and to name it instead "The Wilderness"?
FLOURNOY: Well, a lot of people in my life were kind of - they were thinking, well, not everybody likes millennials.
(LAUGHTER)
FLOURNOY: Some people might be turned off. And I thought, well, maybe they'll hate read it and then I'll win them over. But I also thought that there is something that is - it's very specific as far as in our contemporary moment, but there's something universal about the experience of navigating middle life or into middle life, which is that there are just a lot fewer guideposts. There's you can go to college or not go to college. There's some ways when you're getting out of adolescence to figure out, you know - you just, at first and foremost, you know, pay your bills. It's, like, very easy. What do I need to do to pay my bills? But to feel you have a satisfied life or you're satisfied in your life as you enter middle age, that is really on you. There's - you've got to navigate what might feel just completely opaque by yourself in a lot of ways. There are the sort of fellow travelers, but you have to decide what is it going to feel like? What is going to feel satisfactory to you? And that is what I think about when I think about the title, is these women are navigating the wilderness.
SUMMERS: I do have to ask, and this is a little personal, but I think we're both probably in that same sort of age cohort - that coming into middle age, late 30s, early 40s. How did writing these characters, their journeys, their time in the wilderness - how did that make you reflect on your own life in this phase?
FLOURNOY: So many different ways - I think mostly I thought about what will it sort of take (laughter) for me to feel like a grown-up? Like, what will it take for me to feel like I'm the one who has, like, the authority, like I have the knowledge? And there's these things that come along, and they're supposed to be the moments, whether that's because you have a child or because you get the fancy title at work. But I think outside of those things - 'cause you and I probably both know people who on paper they look like grown-ups, but then if you talk to them, they don't think they've got it together, or they've reached that point in their life, right?
And I think it has to do with, like, a true sense of grounding, whether that is you're feeling grounded in your community, whether that's because you're feeling grounded in your professional life. But something that feels like, well, people could take away a lot of things from me, but they can't take away, like, this feeling. And I think that that is something that the people in the book are really searching for. And to various degrees, I think they - some of them find it, even if it's very fleeting.
SUMMERS: When I started doing research for this interview, I read this old profile of you from BuzzFeed, and it was written back in 2016, around when you would have been starting work on this book. And in that profile, you make this observation that the only people who really understand Black women, or even care to understand Black women, are Black women ourselves. We see our own complexity and our own potential in a way that others either don't recognize or don't care to recognize. And you also make the point that the awesomeness of being a Black woman isn't really explored in literature. I wonder, do you still feel that way?
FLOURNOY: I absolutely think that there is a way that most people - there's - since 2016, I would say, there's been, like, an interesting reversal where, for some reason, in some circles, Black women have become these kind of, like, superheroes. Like, we're going to save democracy. We're going to be the ones who always vote appropriately, etc. And that also just does not feel like a full - giving people full humanity.
SUMMERS: Right.
FLOURNOY: So I think probably more than thinking about, like, the full awesomeness of Black women, what I was seeking, and what I always am sort of charging myself with in my fiction, is just the full complexity. And I do think that there are many writers now that are providing those portraits. Many of us have, like, really deep intellectual lives, and that's something that I tried not to shy away from in this book, was just showing that these women, they don't just have deep emotional lives, but they are, you know, thinking about the world. They're thinking about art. They're thinking about things that are bigger than just reactions to circumstances.
SUMMERS: Angela Flournoy's new novel is "The Wilderness." Angela, thank you so much.
FLOURNOY: Thank you.
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