As the rain drizzled down outside The Old Clare Hotel, and Louis Armstrong and his band eased their music out of the lobby’s sound system, it couldn’t have created a more appropriate ambience in which to meet Tayari Jones and discuss her novel Kin – her second Oprah’s book club pick after An American Marriage.
Kin sprawls its way across the deep south of America, through jazz clubs and brothels, in search of mothers.
Here is our similarly sprawling chat – we cover everything from motherhood to Pompeii to writerly self-doubt to…Steven Spielberg’s E.T.?
Tayari, you were here for the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2018 and we are thrilled to have you back here for 2026. What have been your impressions of Australia in the time that you’ve spent here?
Well, when I was here last time, it was my first time at the Sydney Writers' Festival and I was so anxious about being a first timer, wanting to make a good impression. All I remember were my events and I didn't get out very much. I didn't do very many things. So I'm really looking forward to this time seeing more of the city, getting to know more of the writers and just being a little more relaxed.
I'll give you a list of fun things to do when you've got your time off.
Speaking of place, I went to Louisiana in 2016 and I’ve never been to a place in which life and death co-exist so clamorously. It’s a syncopated place. I imagine that’s the same with Memphis, Tennessee. Can you talk to me about what the setting in the book means to you?
Well, my father is from Louisiana, and so I feel like in so many ways my origin story returns there. Before I was born, he migrated. He got an education, he grew up relatively poor in a small town, and he was able to, because of changing civil rights, get a higher education (a PhD actually) and he moved to Atlanta.
So I often think I understand myself to be a person with kind of small town roots (though I'm not from a small town) because of the way in which my father grew up. It's so different from the world that I grew up in. Not only the difference between small town and large city, but also Jim Crow and post Civil Rights. So I almost think of it like people whose parents are immigrants from another country who talk of ‘our home country’ even though they may have never been. In many ways, my home country is a place I can never visit because it doesn't exist anymore. And so I think I keep returning to Louisiana in my fiction for that reason.
It's funny because my mother is not from Atlanta either, but her hometown doesn't figure as strongly in her explanation of who she is as my father’s does. So the idea of the journey from small town to city is essential to my understanding of an African American experience.
There's very little attention given to the urban south. People think of the northern United States as cities and the southern as rural. But the truth of the matter is: if you go to upstate New York, honey, as people say, that is nothing but cold Mississippi. All the American states, they have their cities and they have the rest, so highlighting urban settings in The South, I think is in and of itself subversive.
I both read and listened to this book, and I loved listening to it – its cadence, its musicality. And then I realised that it’s set in two of the most musical places in the world. Can you tell me a little about what musicality means to you in terms of writing?
Writing is something that you feel. I don't know that I consciously focus on musicality, but I do try to capture the way I believe that regular people speak in metaphor. A lot of times we think of metaphor as the job of the writer, the tool of the writer, but actually, everyday people speak in such colourful figurative language they're just not self conscious about it. And I try to capture that because people often say to me, oh, you know, you have such a good sense of metaphor. But I think it's because I come from The South where people, especially black people, speak in metaphor. To capture that on the page is my tribute to them. And I mean, I have listened to the audiobook, and it does have a certain sense of pacing and sound and melody, but I guess I grew up with it. Like when your mother is angry with you, you're not like, wow, that's very musical, what a beautiful turn of phrase. You don't think about it. And to me that's the goal of the writer, is to make it feel effortless, and sound effortless, yet it's there.
And also, don't you think that people who for whatever reason are estranged from power tend to bend the language to their will? Think about how much popular vernacular comes from people who are removed from power. Look at how much comes from the queer community, from the black community, from people blending Spanish and English. It's like people who don't have power in the old fashioned way wield power in language.
It's almost like the equivalent of having a very, very fetching pair of shoes. Very expensive. Like, I may not have money, but I can afford this turn of phrase. I can out-phrase you. You may be able to outspend me, but you cannot out talk me.
There are mothers everywhere in this book – aunts, grandmothers, madams, girlfriends. They are both insistently present and gapingly absent in the novel. What is it about this topic of motherhood that you wanted to explore in the book?
There are several things about motherhood that are interesting to me.
One is the way that motherhood, particularly African American motherhood, has been corrupted by this long tradition of enslavement and domestic work. What does it mean for your actual children if what you do for a living is to pretend to be a mother to other children? What kind of mother does that make you in real life when you come home to your children? And what has been the ripple effect? There are only so many hours in a person's life, and I think about the women who work all day making breakfast, lunch and dinner in someone else's house, feeding someone else's children. When she comes home, it's after dinner because she had to prepare dinner over there and what is left for her children? I've been thinking a lot about my own mother, because her mother worked as a domestic, and what models of mothering came from that. So motherhood has been really wounded and it hasn't been discussed, and discussion is important for healing because people say all the time, “we don't talk about this enough”, and I'm like, “okay, we're going to talk about it. And then what?”
I've been on tour and I've talked to so many women who say they identify with that line “I was tended to, but never mothered”. Even Oprah underlined that as the part when she decided to choose the book [for her bookclub]. Because people feel that their mothers did right by them – they cooked, they cleaned, you went to school wearing a nice dress, everything was tidy. But that kind of doting, I think the labor took it.
So in my characters in Kin, one's mother is dead, one's mother has run away. Even though my interest in my heart was about these mothers who are present yet absent, that doesn't translate well on the page. You have to turn the heat up to make it work in a novel. So on the page, the mother is gone. But the feeling is a feeling that a lot of people experience even when their mother is right there.
And the other thing that was interesting to me about motherhood is our fantasy of mothers. Like, when someone says, “oh, that person is very motherly”, you think, oh, that means the person is kind, that person is helpful – all these wonderful attributes we associate with motherhood. But in real life, mothers are complex people. There is no one thing that is motherly. So I think about mothers struggling to be real people in the face of a commonly agreed upon cultural fantasy of who they’re supposed to be.
The novel follows two young women, moving through the world, looking for a mother’s love and then it occurred to me that the whole time, that was you. You, Tayari, were guiding these girls through the world. Did you have a sense of that at all?
You know, I do feel when I'm in the process of writing or drafting, that I am reporting what I see them doing. Like, I'm surprised when they're surprised. When Lulabelle said “this here is a whorehouse”, Annie was shocked. I was shocked. We were just shocked together.
But when I'm done with the book, I can see where I got the idea from. I realised why Lulabelle says, “this here's a whorehouse”. I was on the plane back from Italy – my aunt had won a vacation to Amalfi in a raffle or something, and she's like, “oh, please, you all just come and you don't have to pay for anything, you Just have to get here”, so we all went and it was a great trip. One of the things that she had received in this package was a trip to Pompeii. It was so hot. But in Pompeii, they have brothels the way we have pharmacies! Visiting Pompeii put brothels in the back of my mind, and so then when I'm on the plane home, the characters end up in a brothel. Then once they were there, I started really thinking: but why does it matter? That's why Baby Doll doesn't like Lulabelle, because she's like, “I don't care how nice she is to you. Basically, this is a human trafficking operation.” And so it added to the complexities. Some readers see it as adding to the fun of the novel, but I think of it as adding to the complexity – how she can be so loving toward Annie, yet she is in fact, running a trafficking operation.
