Episode 236: Chibundu Onuzo, author of Sankofa (Counterpoint), on how she conceived of the fictional country of Bamana:
“I did a lot of research. I didn’t want to just create stuff. I feel sometimes people do that with Africa…like it’s a blank space. They just project things onto it. So, I didn’t want to call my fictional country ‘Manga Bungo’ and pick some random phrases that don’t mean anything because Africa is this blank space for you to project whatever you want onto it.… ‘Bamana’ is a real ancient West African kingdom. Things like that I tried to ground in reality, so it felt real.”
Episode 238: Tiphanie Yanique, author of Monster in the Middle (Riverhead), on the Vivian Gornick epigraph she chose for the book (“Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large?”):
“Her argument in her book (The End of the Novel of Love) was that love novels don’t really work for us as a culture anymore. Because we know—in quotation marks ‘know’—that romance is not going to be the thing that saves us at the end of the day. That falling in love is not what saves us. And I thought, this woman is smart, but I don’t know if I believe her. I’m not sure if she’s right, you know? So I thought, I’m going to write a book to see if I can tease out this statement—to see if I agree with her, or to challenge her.…Her whole book was actually a launching pad for Monster in the Middle. In a way, I’m testing out her theory.”
Episode 240: Rax King, author of Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have To Offer (Vintage), on the distinction between tacky and trashy:
“To me, something tacky is maybe closest to campy or kitschy. It’s fun in a way that makes you feel bad for enjoying it. What I hope to do is to eliminate that guilt and leave people with the sense that these are things that are OK to enjoy. Whereas something trashy is disreputable for a reason. It’s not just kitschy and campy and Technicolor and too cutesy and goofy to like. It’s something that has a bad reputation that it sort of deserves. It doesn’t make people feel good, really, to engage with something that’s trashy the way that it makes you feel good, in that guilty way, to engage with something that’s tacky.”
Editor at large Megan Labrise is the host of the Fully Booked podcast. Find new episodes every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or at kirkusreviews.com/podcast.
