Yaa Gyasi On 'Transcendent Kingdom' And Communing With Our Childhood Selves

The award-winning author of Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi, has just published her second novel titled Transcendent Kingdom. It follows the story of Gifty, an intellectual young researcher struggling to understand her mother and the pain that addiction and depression have played in her family. Gyasi spoke with WFDD's Bethany Chafin ahead of her virtual appearance with Bookmarks Thursday evening. 

Interview Highlights

On how Transcendent Kingdom was born out of a previous short story:

I really loved the voice of this story. I loved thinking about this character who was incredibly academic, having to think about how to relate to her very religious mother. I found it just to be a really kind of fun and freeing exercise to write a story so different from the novel that I had been working on for several years [Homegoing].

On what our younger selves would think of the adults we've become:

One way that writing this book had me reflecting on my childhood is that, like Gifty, I did grow up in the Pentecostal church. And similarly to Gifty as well, I grew up in a predominantly white community attending a predominantly white Pentecostal church. And so I think I was thinking back to what it felt like to go to that church, what it felt like just to be a child who had all of this faith and what became of that. So I think that was an aspect of my childhood that I was thinking about. But ... wondering what a child's self might think about the woman that you become is certainly something that I think about a lot, particularly around the times when I have a book coming out, because this was such a childhood dream. I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And every time I publish a novel, I kind of feel proud not just of myself, but of the child who believed fervently in this.

On what propels Transcendent Kingdom forward:

I think it's just the characters and their relationship to one another. I think the thing that makes the novel feel propulsive is that you get to see how much care Gifty is giving to her mother. You feel this hopefulness and this drive to see Gifty and her mother repair the things that are broken, to connect, to take care of each other, to heal. And so I think that's what's driving this forward, that desire to know what will become of both of these women.

On seeing characters in many dimensions:

Well, the goal is to always try to see them in as many dimensions as possible and to allow them to kind of reveal themselves to me. I'm not really a big planner when I write novels. Like, I don't have character sketches and I don't have outlines. I want to still feel — even though I'm aware of the fact that I am creating the characters — I want to still feel surprised by them and interested in getting to know them. And I feel like part of how that happens is by just kind of letting the story emerge as it will. And so I don't know if I have a better explanation for how that kind of work happens other than to say that it feels like another form of listening, I guess, to try to find out what a character wants to tell you and who she is.