“How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story,” he thinks, “without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow?” Further still, “if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He wants to study the convict-leasing system in the United States that essentially re-created the conditions of slavery for many African Americans in the South, including his own grandfather, but he feels the story cannot begin or end there. in sociology at Stanford University, and-as happens-is struggling to decide what to write his dissertation about. Our reviewer wrote, “‘Transcendent Kingdom’ trades the blazing brilliance of ‘Homegoing’ for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name.Late in Homegoing, the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, a character named Marcus is introduced. She channeled that inspiration into her narrator, Gifty, a neuroscience graduate student who studies reward-seeking behavior as it relates to depression and addiction. “When I started to think about what I wanted to write about next, I remembered this time in the lab,” Gyasi says. There was no lightning bolt moment while she was there - just the sense of fascination that a writer learns to lean into. She says, “I literally could not understand any of the paragraphs.” So, in a gesture of support and encouragement, she asked to shadow her friend for the day. The friend, a neuroscientist, was approaching the end of her doctorate and had just published a major paper that Gyasi tried to read, to no avail. 6 in its second week on the hardcover fiction list, was inspired by a visit to a Stanford University lab where an old friend worked. Gyasi’s new book, “ Transcendent Kingdom,” now at No. That was wonderful, but it took me a little bit to figure out how to return to the quiet that had allowed me to write in the first place.”
“But then after ‘Homegoing’ came out into a light that was so bright, I became keenly aware that there are people who will pick up my books. It’s such an intensely private and intimate experience,” she explains. “With the first book, it’s like writing in the dark, unsure of whether or not your book will ever see the light of day.
Yaa Gyasi says she was intimidated by the prospect of a second novel after “ Homegoing,” which she worked on for seven years. One minute these invisible readers are cheerleaders the next, they’re pelting the computer screen with popcorn. An author attempting a follow-up has an audience in mind, which can be discombobulating. SOPHOMORE SUCCESS Writing a debut novel requires gumption and perseverance, but at least it’s a solitary endeavor.
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