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Few writers capture the complexity of Black American life its relationships, its tensions, its tenderness — quite like Tayari Jones. In this intimate fireside conversation, the celebrated author joins us to discuss Kin, her latest work of literary fiction and a profound exploration of the ties that bind us, break us, and ultimately bring us back to ourselves. For anyone who has ever loved deeply and complicated, this conversation is for you.
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00:07Hello, Nola. How's everyone doing? All right, all right. Thank you for joining us. I am seated here
00:18with, you know why we're here, Tarari Jones. I was stumbling on this backstage. Y'all forgive me.
00:27This is a literary icon here. American marriage. Yes. Let's give her her flowers. Oprah, best-selling,
00:41Oprah's book club, best-selling author, all the things. We're just going to jump right in.
00:47And we're here today to talk primarily about Ken, but of course we'll get into other things as well,
00:53okay? So Ken very powerfully, intentionally navigates a biological family and, you know,
01:07the family that we choose. What made you want to explore the different types of family in this book,
01:13in this novel? First, thank you everybody for coming out. I know you have a lot of things you
01:20can do when you're here at the festival and I appreciate your time. Ken is the story of two
01:25girls who are best friends since they were infants sharing a cradle. And so they grow up, I often would
01:31say they grow up like sisters, but really they grow up as sisters because, you know, your family is who
01:38you want your family to be. I'm very interested in this idea. They call it found family, but I like
01:44to
01:44think of it as curated family. The people whom we choose to have in our lives show what for us
01:50is
01:51kind of like the emotional utopia of our lives, who we choose to have with us. And I think we
01:56all need
01:57chosen family. So often when we talk about chosen family, people think that's a referendum on your
02:03biological family, right? Like it's almost like whenever you even hear the word biological, when you
02:08use the word biological, it means you don't like those people. Like if you say that is my biological
02:13father, we know you don't like that man. But I believe that you can have people that serve as say
02:22mother figures in your life. And that doesn't mean that you're cheating on your actual mother.
02:26It's like part of being an adult, I think, is curating who you want to have around you.
02:34So true. And then
02:38you stated that you lost a close friend during the pandemic, during COVID, and another close friend
02:46about five years ago. Do you think that those deaths were catalysts for you wanting to write this
02:53book? I think that all of us lost so many people in 2020 and that we have not properly grieved
03:02as a culture. We've decided to move on. But this is also a novel about the ways that we hold
03:09people
03:09in our hearts, even when they're not with us. And what it means to lose a close friend. I mean,
03:15when you think about it, your closest friends have half of your memory. Like you ever talk about
03:21something with an old friend and you remember it and she can point out something you have forgotten.
03:26So it's like she has in her heart, the archive of your life. And so when you lose a friend,
03:34you are losing part of your archive. And so this is a novel about grieving the loss of the person
03:41being with you every day, but also grieving the loss of that memory of that, that other part of your
03:48experience. So true. And something that you did brilliantly in the book, Aunt Irene's character
03:59reminded her niece of things about her mother that, you know, Annie never got to experience,
04:08or she, you know, didn't get to experience in real life. But she had these stories that,
04:14you know, would come up and so forth. Can you talk to us a little about the power of aunts?
04:20I do think your aunts can tell you some stories. And it's not always a story you want to hear.
04:26But, you know, Niecy is raised by her aunt. And she, what I didn't realize, even as a child myself,
04:34I knew a lot of people who were raised by their aunts and raised by their grandmothers.
04:37I never even understood that meant they didn't have their mothers. You know, when I was a child,
04:42I just thought different people get raised by different people. I didn't understand the grief
04:46that was all around me of people being not raised by their mothers. But, and also, what does it mean
04:51for these women who have to raise children? They were not planning on raising. Like, you know,
04:57the grandmother might've thought it was time for her to live her best life, her empty nest life.
05:02And now she has another child to raise. So what does that mean for our own relationships with our
05:07mothers? I was also wondering, like, how has our relationship with our mothers as black women,
05:13what, what is the legacy of say domestic work? Like, I feel like so many mothers of that generation,
05:20this book is set in the fifties and sixties. So many of that mothers were working in white people's
05:26houses, taking care of those children. What does it mean when the thing you do, mothering is such an
05:32intimate job, but you're doing it for work. What kind of mother are you when you get home? Like how
05:37many of us didn't have our mothers and grandmothers full of tension because of that work? In the book,
05:43Nisi's mother-in-law says, our mothers were stolen from us. Someone should write a book about it. And I
05:49was like, yes, ma'am, I'm here. Wow. Yes. And, and sorry, to elaborate on that a little bit,
06:00um, I want to talk about intergenerational bonds, the multi-generational bonds that are so profound
06:07in this book. And the fact that many of us, most of us grew up hearing, um, I'm your mama.
06:14I'm not
06:14one of your little friends. Right. And I'm 50. I turned 50 this year. And that may still come up
06:22sometimes to be completely transparent. Uh, what made you tackle this? Can you elaborate
06:27more on that? I moved back home to Atlanta. I had lived in New York, you know, chasing this writer
06:33dream, but I knew it was time for me to go back home. I'm 55. My mother is 85. It's
06:39time for me
06:39to go home. So I went home and part of my fantasy of going home is that I wanted to
06:45get to know my
06:45mother. Like we are two grown women, because when I would come home to visit, I would always be in
06:50my
06:51childhood bedroom. And you know, like how are we going to talk like two grown women when one person
06:57is sleeping? It's stuffed animals in that room. So I felt like I needed to be around my mother where
07:03they are. Neither one of us in the stuffed animal room. We could just talk like grown women. But like
07:08you were saying, your mother says she's not your little friend. My mama still has no interest in
07:12being my little friend. I realized that was my fantasy, not hers. And so this book, I felt like my
07:19imagination really was filling in the blanks of what was it like to grow up in the 50s? And to
07:25all
07:25the questions that we look at in our lives now, like we think about issues of sexuality. We look at,
07:32you know, idea of work, marriage, ambition, friendship, all of these things that we think
07:38about now, they thought about then they just don't talk about it. So I wanted to think like, what was
07:44it
07:44like coming of age against the background of the civil rights movement? Everything around you is
07:49changing. How do you find your place in it? What does it mean for what type of mother you want
07:55to be? So
07:55these are the questions I had to ask in my imagination, because nobody's telling me in real life.
08:05Wow. And so also to that point, when we think about the Jim Crow South, or at least what we've
08:11been
08:12programmed to think about the Jim Crow South or life across the country in the 50s and 60s,
08:18we're always bombarded with the strife and the pain and the struggle. But you found a way to
08:24powerfully remind us that there was also joy. There was community. There was within the community,
08:31there's a lot of people rooting for you, right? And there was life happening beyond what we see in the
08:39history books. I mean, here's the thing. Okay, I'll tell you a little story. When I was I was being
08:45interviewed. And the woman who was interviewing me, she hadn't read the book. I knew she hadn't read
08:51the book. Because in my day job, I teach, I'm a professor, which means I spend a lot of time
08:58talking
08:58to people who are pretending to have read books. So I knew she had not read this book. So she
09:05looked at
09:05the back of the book. She was like, and I'm not mad. You know, she got to interview five people
09:09a week.
09:09She can't read all these books. But she had not read mine. So she looked at the back of that
09:13book.
09:13I know she was like, okay, 1950s, Jim Crow, black, got it. And so then she started by being like,
09:20this book was so painful. I had to put it down. Because I couldn't bear thinking about all our people
09:27had been through. And I said, this book? And she said, yes. Because her first thought was, it's set
09:37in the 50s. This must be about how hard it is to be black. But every book I write is
09:43about how
09:43beautiful it is to be black, how complex it is to be black. And yes, the characters, they experience
09:50racism. But I like to think that the way that people experience racism, a lot of times, racism
09:56doesn't wear hard boots. It doesn't clump around where you can hear it coming. It wears, racism
10:02sometimes walks around, it's wearing its socks. You didn't even hear it. You didn't even hear it
10:07until it came up to you and tapped you on the shoulder. And you looked around with the shock
10:11that it was there. So in the meantime, people have, they fall in love, right? People fall in love.
10:17People fall out of love. You know, people have queer relationships. People have all kinds of life
10:23in the 1950s. They also had Jim Crow, but they had life. And that, to me, if you write characters
10:30that are not having life, then you are compromising their humanity. As a writer, I will never, ever
10:37compromise my character's humanity to make a point.
10:46You shared that you found, so we all know that you're a Spelman College alum.
10:52Yes. Yes, we are.
10:55You shared that you found your, the confidence to become a professional writer, to make writing
11:02a career at Spelman. Talk to us about that.
11:05Well, you know, I went to Spelman. I was the youngest girl in my class. I'm in the class
11:09in 1991. I was the youngest girl in the class. I was only 16. And I went to Spelman and
11:14I
11:14didn't know, I knew that I liked to read and I liked to write, but I didn't know that that
11:20meant that I could be a writer. Because when I was growing up, if you like to read and you
11:25like to write, people thought that just meant you were a nice girl, right? You know, I'm
11:29sure y'all have all heard Chris Rock when he says, you know, when you have a daughter,
11:34only thing you need to do is to keep her off the pole. Well, this means then you don't
11:38even notice that she's a writer. All you can see is that she's nice. I think so many
11:42girls' potential is lost because all people think about is sexual respectability and they
11:48can't see anything else about you. So I went to Spelman, a nice girl that liked to read
11:54and liked to write, but I was so blessed that I met a writer and she was my teacher. Her
12:00name
12:00is Pearl Clegg and I met Pearl and she said to me, she said, so what are you thinking about
12:07these days? I got ready to tell her and she said, no, don't tell me, write it down. And
12:14just in that, she took me seriously enough to care what I was thinking and she became my
12:21first audience. And I feel like that changed the course of my life. You never know how much
12:26a little bit of attention can change the life of a young person.
12:34So you've also said that black women have sustained you.
12:41Talk to us about what that means and the power of black women's support in your career and
12:49out of your career.
12:51Well, you know, a lot of people may know that one of my mentors, me and Renee, one of our
12:55mentors
12:56is Nikki Giovanni. And Nikki always would tell us, take care of these black women readers
13:02because they will take care of you in return. She said, with other people, you'll be flavor
13:06of the month. You could come and go. But she's like, black readers, black women, she said,
13:11even if you write a book they don't like, they'll hang in there and give you another chance on
13:14the next one because they are your family. And this has a different poignancy now because
13:20she said, take care of those black women because they will come to your funeral.
13:25And I will say, even in my own life, y'all, me, humble me, I accidentally trended on the threads.
13:32Did you all know this?
13:35I didn't because I was here. A friend of mine texted me and said, are you okay? I thought she
13:39was talking about my flight. I said, it was delayed, but I'm here. You know, I got my room.
13:44I got something to eat. And she was like, no, you're, you're trending on the threads.
13:48And I missed the whole thing. But what I did not miss was all the readers who were saying,
13:54we got you. You are not going to disrespect Tiare. And people mentioned things I had done
14:00for them 20 years ago. Like no one had forgotten. And I realized I was like, this community we
14:07have of black women, readers, writers, and there were also men in there, but it was mostly
14:12black women. I felt, I feel like a little tearful even right now thinking about,
14:17it. I felt so loved and lifted up, not just as a writer, but as a person. And I am
14:22so grateful
14:23for it.
14:29And I still don't know what happened.
14:37What is one thing you would like everyone here, and it is standing room only, you would
14:44like everyone here to know about Ken, to take away after reading Ken, experiencing the book?
14:54Can I say more than one thing?
14:56Yes, yes, yes.
14:57Because I feel like our lives are complex, and there's more than one thing going on. But
15:01when I wrote Ken, with it being set in the 50s, I feel like I was able to write with
15:07a certain
15:07optimism. Because when I'm writing in the 50s and the 60s, you know, I know the Civil Rights Act is
15:13coming. You know, like the song says, I know change gonna come. So I was able to write because I
15:19know
15:19something the characters don't know yet. I don't know how I could write today, because I don't know
15:24what's around the corner. And I think that writing about the past can, in fact, give us a warning bell
15:30to the future. So if there's anything, one thing I feel like looking at the past, I mean, everyone talks
15:36a lot about the Jim Crow aspect in this book, but also think about the way of women's rights in
15:42this book,
15:43about women's reproductive rights. You know, Kimmy is here, her book, A Terrible Strength, is all about
15:50the gynecological crisis in black women's lives. And I think this book is also about what happens when people
15:57cannot control their fertility, and how if you cannot control your reproduction, you cannot control your life.
16:03We all grew up in the age, we never grew up without contraception. So we don't, it's hard for us
16:10to
16:11emotionally get our heads around if that's taken away. Like in this book, in the 50s, people were just
16:15out there rolling the dice. Kids just everywhere. Like you just couldn't, as long as you were living a
16:22sexual human life, you were rolling the dice on having kids. And we don't really emotionally understand
16:29that. And I hope and pray that we don't have to understand that. So I need everybody to vote.
16:34I need everybody to vote in the midterms. So that's one thing. But also, I want us all to love
16:41on our besties. Black women's friendships have sustained us. Do not let Bravo convince you that
16:49black women cannot really be friends. We are, the media will have you gaslight you into questioning
16:54what you already know. You have known how you've been lifted up. And so take care of your friends.
17:01Take care of your strong friend. And if you, like me, are the strong friend,
17:07allow yourself to be tender and let someone take care of you.
17:17I have to clap with everyone. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for coming and joining
17:24us. I really do invite you. The book is for sale to my left. But in addition to that, if
17:31you haven't
17:32already, please check out the woman who wrote culture. It's like a gallery wall. And there are
17:39pictures of the author. There's one of you. Have you seen it? There's one of you at Spelman
17:45College on a pay phone. I know that picture. I thought I was cute. Yes. I had that asymmetric
17:51haircut. You could not tell me nothing. It's really special. And it reminds me of a wall my
18:00grandmother used to have in her house of her grandchildren and her children. But please check
18:04it out. And thank you for being here. Thank you. And let's give it up for our sign language interpreters.
18:17Thank you, everybody, for coming. I really appreciate it.
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