But I don't know if Gifty would be keen on as a scientist. Being comfortable with that disorder and with that messiness is something that I really appreciate about writing fiction. Which feels somewhat at odds to how I think of art-making, which is disorderly, following all of these threads. She wants to break everything down and figure it out and have it makes sense and be orderly.
She's so clearly analytical, very much student to this lifestyle of science. But in terms of differences, I think Gifty is a really fascinating character and thinks a lot differently than me - part of that is the whole right brain/left brain thing. I'm really interested in how place interacts with the stories we're trying to tell. Those kinds of touchstones are always nice for me. And Huntsville I'm comfortable with obviously. So the fact that this takes place at Stanford is a place that I'm comfortable with. I often set things in places that I've lived in, to give me some grounding as a writer. YG: I think the similarities are pretty obvious. In some ways, I think that people could say that that parallels your life, but are there also some differences?
But overall, really from page one, it felt like a different project.ĬK: It’s Gifty’s story about growing up and becoming a scientist, a journey from growing up in a struggling immigrant family from Ghana in Alabama to becoming an elite research scientist at the nation's top academic institutions.
Some of the themes from Homegoing still run through this, the questions about what we make of our lives after we have experienced or been handed down this trauma from the older generations - that's something that I continue to be interested in. This felt like such a different kind of story that I wanted to tell, much quieter. I don't think I was trying to take on another, many-century project again. YAA GYASI: From the beginning, this seemed very clearly to be a story that was going to be a lot more intimate. She talked to Shondaland from her apartment in Brooklyn, where she has been sheltering from the coronavirus.ĬAROLYN KELLOGG: Congratulations on the new novel! Homegoing was this huge epic, and Transcendent Kingdom is much more internal. Gyasi is all right-brain creative, and her family, while Pentecostal, didn’t face the same travails as the family in her novel. Like Gifty, Gyasi is from Ghana and grew up in Huntsville, but their paths split. Woven into that is the question of faith - she was raised Pentecostal - and the tension between science and belief.
But she’s haunted by her family - her father, gone back to Ghana, and her brother, a star athlete turned addict. She was a poor girl from Huntsville, Alabama who made it to Harvard then Stanford, propelled by her intelligence and will. All along, Gifty is, circuitously, relating the story of her life.
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