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A Conversation with Angela Flournoy
November 17, 2016
Julie Geen: This is Angela Flournoy. She has written a book, The Turner House. I wanted to start off by asking Angela what she was like as a reader and a writer when she was in high school.
Angela Flournoy: As a reader in high school I was very much an omnivore. I went through phases. I read anything that seemed interesting. It’s interesting how people make it seem like novels that are in series [are] new. But that’s always been a thing that teenagers are interested in. I remember my Anne Rice phase. I was never into Anne Rice witches, though—only vampires. I read all of the vampire books. I think in high school was when I discovered Zora Neale Hurston. Then I read all of her books. Some people would say that one of those was highbrow and one of those isn’t. But you don’t care, really, when you’re reading for pleasure.
My sister is three years older than me. When I was a freshman, she was a senior. I read most of her books that she was reading for English, which were above my grade level and which she was reading when she went to college.
I used to write bad poetry in high school and in junior high school. It was therapy. I knew it was bad. I knew it was bad immediately. Even though I didn’t know—I still don’t know anything about poetry—I knew that this is a little hokey. Especially because I became obsessed with iambic pentameter. That was in 1996. We are coming upon the twentieth anniversary or just past of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. I was very obsessed with that movie.
I had this book with all the Shakespeare tragedies. I got Romeo + Juliet blown up to 8.5 x 11” pages and then I put it in this folder and then I took puffy paint and decorated the front of it. And then I took stills from the movie. (This was in the early days of the internet so they were super pixelated.) I cut them out, and I taped them next to the corresponding parts of the actual play. And this was really important to me. [Obviously] I had a lot of friends—I was very popular.
But I did read a lot and I wrote bad poetry. And I read Shakespeare I didn’t understand.
Audience: [The] Turner House struck me because of the history and because of the scope of it. I wanted to ask you about your research, how you got started with that, and what sparked your interest.
AF: I’m not from Detroit. My Dad is. I’ve visited throughout my life. I’ve never lived there. I’ve never been there for more than two weeks at one time. I was thinking that I needed to do research to find out, even in 2008, what neighborhoods looked like. By the time I started writing this book, it was only 2010, but things change very quickly in Detroit.
I [have] subsequently figured out the method to my madness which is my research process. I start very, very boring: city planning documents, how streets connect to other streets, where big parks are, how our character is (actually in her car) going to get from point A to point B. If any of you have seen the SNL skit “The Californians,” it’s all about like, “How did you get here?” Then the people describe the freeways they took. I start there.
A lot of people are interested in lack of inner-city life and also the decline of a lot of big inner cities in this country. [The] Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue talks about the way that Great Migration was met with a backlash of housing segregation that was both sanctioned by the government and also was something that was just the norm in communities. People had these real estate pacts: “You don’t sell to them, I don’t sell to them.” And then oppositely, what happened when opportunistic real estate agents said, “No, we’re going to do the opposite. We’re gonna blockbust.” Which is basically, “We’re gonna scare all of the white residents into selling their house to us for very cheap, just so they’d get out of town because they’re afraid black people are moving into their neighborhoods. And then we’re going to attract these African Americans in these really exploitative mortgages.” If you default for one month, you lose everything you’ve paid, no matter if you’ve been paying for fifteen years.
I found all this information, and I realized it was important to the characters specifically, because in the beginning, I knew I wanted to write about their relationship to this house. That was something I never really understood growing up—why certain communities are more tied to the family home than others. But once I learned that history, I’m like, “Of course. Because you had to fight all these obstacles to get this house. It would become something that’s bigger than just real estate. It’s something bigger than that. This is an accomplishment to have this piece of property.” And so I had to figure out a way to kind of integrate that.
Also for the parts in the ’40s—which I wrote last because I didn’t think that I could successfully integrate them—in my research I found out there were these neighborhoods that don’t exist anymore in Detroit called Paradise Valley and Black Bottom that were integral to especially migrants from the South to the North in the ’20s through the ’50s. There’s no evidence of them now. There’s a casino in one of the main thoroughfares. That’s about it. There’s railroad tracks and there’s a freeway that the city has built right through that neighborhood now.
I had a lot of doubt when I was working on this book. [I thought,] “I’m not from this place. How am I gonna pull this off?” When I found out there was a neighborhood that doesn’t exist anymore, that existed pre–internet (so there’s limited archival evidence of this place), I was like, “This is one area where I can feel a little bit more flexible and confident to just make stuff up.” And only a small subset of people still alive will be able to tell me, “You did this wrong,” versus the parts in 2008—anybody in Detroit off the street could just be like, “You got this wrong.”
Audience: Did you have Detroit in mind from the beginning, though?
AF: Yeah. I wanted to write about a house that was in a similar situation or predicament as my father’s house, which was on the east side of Detroit in a neighborhood that’s very depopulated. There’s houses that are dilapidated, some that are burned down, or some that are just empty lots. But then there’s also some where the family clearly—whether they lived there or not, whether it’s just an elderly person who lives there—have worked really hard to keep the house looking beautiful. My family’s house was one of those. But it looked like it didn’t belong on the block it was on. When my grandmother got to a certain age she didn’t want to live there. None of my cousins wanted to live there. I didn’t think there were a lot of other cities in the country where that would be the case. Subsequently I can think of a few more, but at the time I couldn’t think of any other ones, so it was always going to be Detroit.
Audience: Based off of how important the house was—why did you end the novel the way you did, without deciding the fate of the house?
AF: There’s no really easy resolution. The only really easy resolution is to burn the house down. I could’ve done that, but it seems like you do all this work and the house is a character. It’s basically like killing it.
They have hopes that they can short-sell it. It’s not very feasible. Parts of the Detroit housing market have started to really boom and that’s really in a small part of the city. The city is huge. It was designed to accommodate people with giant cars [who] were willing to live really far from each other. At a time, it had two million people and now it has under seven hundred thousand people. Not all those people have cars. I wanted to have to leave the reader with the same uncertainty people of Detroit have to live with. Like my own family—the issue of the house is not solved. It’s not at all. And that’s six years later from when it first got into the state it was in. I didn’t think that there could be a sort of easy resolution.
Cade Varnado: I was struck reading some of the Layla sections that are set in casinos. There’s a lot of vocabulary terms coming in here. I’ve seen a million scenes set in casinos in movies and books. I can see myself thinking, “I need to put a character in a casino!” But I wouldn’t have that vocabulary. And I was wondering—when you need that window-dressing expertise—how do you go about acquiring it? Did you take a field trip to a casino?
AF: There’s a casino that’s outside of Iowa City in Riverside, Iowa, called The Riverside Casino. It’s a sad place, but it’s the right kind of sad place. There’s a difference between casinos that are in Atlantic City or Vegas or even New Orleans, places that people from out of town frequent often. Those feel like an escape. It feels like you’re not going there to bet more money than you can afford to lose. It’s a liminal space. But casinos, particularly in the Rust Belt, and some other parts of the country, you are there to do a job. And that job is to make more money than you came in with. The tone is completely different. The décor is different because of that. The way that the gamblers interact with the staff is different because of that. I wanted to explore one of those kinds of casinos.
I’m from L.A. I’ve been to Vegas a lot. Every time I would go to a casino in Detroit, I would be able to tell—this is different. The vibe is different. That doesn’t mean that people don’t have fun there ’cause they still have so many things to do besides gamble, but the vibe is different immediately.
Maybe I just Googled? The great thing about YouTube is that there’s a YouTube video for everything. There’s YouTube videos that will break down the steps of roulette and the vocabulary. Google people love tutorials. The only challenge is to figure out a happy medium between trying to be precise and communicate Layla’s precision and not become encyclopedic with it.
CV: Right. Don’t reproduce the entire tutorial.
AF: Right. And I thought I did good in the book, but that chapter, “Motor City, Friday Night” was excerpted by The Paris Review. For that, it was edited again by Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review. He took out so many numbers. At first I was like, “No one’s gonna understand what’s at stake!” It reads great. It’s funny how if you set it up and then you just remind the readers once and you come back to it at the end—you don’t have to do nearly as much informing as we think you have to do.
Audience: You mentioned that you wrote the 1940s sections last. Does that mean there was a draft of the book that didn’t have those in them? Or did you always know you were going to hold them off until the end?
AF: There was a draft of the book that didn’t have them in there. I knew that they should be in there but I was afraid to write them. I’d got an agent based on two hundred pages that were missing that section. They were missing other things, too. It was basically my MFA thesis but they had no parts from the ’40s. The bones and all the parts from the present were there. Some chapters just needed to be rewritten, taken out, or put back in. Not everybody’s agent is really interested in getting into editorial nitty gritty with you. But she [Ellen Levine] is. I agreed for her to represent me in May of 2012.
We agreed on a December deadline for the notes that she had, which were just based on the present. What I gave her was actually this new thing with all of these sections from the ’40s, which I think for her probably changed everything, as far as what she thought this book was. It really opened it up in some ways. And it made thematic things happen that weren’t happening before. I actually didn’t know I was gonna write it, but I was getting close to the deadline, and I knew that some of the other suggestions that she wanted actually weren’t the problem. The problem was, I needed to woman up and write these sections from the ’40s. I was living in D.C., and so I rented an AirBnB in Takoma [Park], Maryland. There was nothing around it. I got a box of pizza and stayed in there for seventy-two hours and forced myself to write all of those sections from the ’40s. They all came pouring out because it was some of the earliest research I had done. I didn’t think it belonged in the book for whatever reasons that we tell ourselves. Probably because I thought it was going to be hard, mostly.
Audience: Did that material get into the book in another way in the earlier draft?
AF: No. Frances and Viola were much more on the periphery in general in the early drafts. Some of her [Levine’s] edits were like, “Can you have more scenes with Frances and Viola in 2008?” And I realized—no, what they really need is to exist in the 1940s instead of trying to have these conversations that will do the job.
Audience: How do you keep track of all these characters? What made you decide that you needed that many? And did you ever think about taking some out since you weren’t establishing them? Did you have more?
AF: I never intended to establish all of the siblings. There’s a very particular way of seeing yourself and seeing the world that happens when you’re one person in this huge web of history and expectations and interactions. I always knew that it was really going to be focused on two people—opposite poles of this long line. From their different generational vantages and gender, we were going to see what are the different kind of pressures and pleasures of being part of something this big. The thirteen was actually something that just happened—a byproduct of grad school. I was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the same time as a friend of mine, a novelist named Ayana Mathis. We are the same year and we both started writing our novels at the end of our first years, over that summer. I didn’t talk to her at all that summer. When we came back, actually, another Cabell prizewinner, Justin Torres, was talking to me about what I had written that summer. And I’m like, “Oh, I’m writing this novel and there’s a big family, more than ten, I’m not exactly sure how many.” And he was like, “You know, Ayana is writing a book about eleven siblings, Great Migration siblings, and it’s actually gonna be twelve because she’s also talking about the granddaughter and she’s gonna call it The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which is a very good name.” And I was like, “Whose side are you on?! What are you saying?!” And she already had an agent. We have the same agent. She already had the agent that I already wanted. And she was writing the book that I wanted to write. I went up one.
This book is about ways that family’s shifted. If you have more than nine children, you might get a TV show nowadays, but a generation ago, that wasn’t the most unusual thing. I knew I wanted more than ten for that reason. She took eleven and twelve. Thirteen is a number I was familiar with growing up because my father is one of thirteen. I felt like it was a sign that I was supposed to stick with the number that I knew.
Audience: How many siblings do you have?
AF: I am one of four.
Audience: How did you handle the timing? How did you know when to leave one character and go on to the next?
AF: At Iowa, to graduate you have to have a thesis of creative work and then you also have to do an MFA exam, which is just an essay that used to be thirty pages—but then the poets complained, so now it’s only eighteen to twenty pages—about craft. Mine was about managing a large cast of characters. I thought about it all the time.
Every chapter in a book should have some kind of movement. But when you have a large cast of characters, the pressure is increased because you may not see them in the next chapter. It’s almost cinematic in a way, like soap operas—you may only see a person once in an episode but you see that there was some movement in their story line. Layla doesn’t talk to a lot of people in her chapters, but things happen. So, for instance, in Layla’s second chapter we learn that she gambles and we learn how she got evicted. We also see the emotional rollercoaster of her being down and up and then down again.
In a Troy chapter, which there are fewer of, it might be we see that he has a terrible idea: “I’m going to trick my mother into doing this thing.” We see him going through with it, not actually feeling any remorse. I have all these theories, but one of them is about what secondary characters have to do and what primary characters don’t have to do. Layla and Cha-Cha can have chapters that are existential. There’s an existential shift of some sort. And Troy’s chapters have to do some sort of plot work. He’s grasping at straws to feel relevant within his family, clearly. He is threatening one of the major conflicts in the book: What is going to happen to this house? Whereas Layla’s chapters don’t necessarily have the pressure of big questions in the book. She doesn’t have to solve them or kind of complicate them. She doesn’t have to do it quickly.
Audience: One of the things we were talking about, too, was the overall structure and how that got mapped out?
AF: The overall structure is fairly simple. Not that much happens in this book. But as far as actual placement—I printed all the chapters out and put them on the floor of my living room and played around with them. And then when I decided where the ’40s chapters could exist, I did sometimes have to go back and then tweak the present day chapters so that they made sense where they were.
Audience: What were you thinking when you picked these problems for these specific characters?
AF: I was just thinking about human beings being complicated and not being perfect. It’s a matter of perspective. I do something that’s very sneaky: early on, Cha-Cha plants the idea in the reader’s mind that all of his siblings have problems with addiction. It’s not true. But it’s what he believes. He’s super judgmental, and he looks at everyone harshly but can’t see himself. Being really excited to run a flea market on the weekends with your mother is not an addiction. That’s a hobby. Cha-Cha doesn’t have any hobbies! His hobby is just taking care of his family. But there are readers who think because he says that, that it must be true. Francis clearly has some depression issues and some addiction issues. Cha-Cha has a late midlife crisis he’s going through. But it’s not dire. He’s taking care of his family. He’s pretty financially secure. Layla’s situation is a lot more dire.
Even Troy—he’s just a jerk. He thinks he’s entitled to everything. It’s not life or death. He just needs to sit down. He clearly has some daddy issues that he’s projecting onto Cha-Cha that have to do with his real father, but he has assigned them to Cha-Cha. One of the things that’s really great about writing multi-POV novels is that you really do get to screw around with your perspective. For instance, Troy has that sob story he tells Jillian about how Cha-Cha left him out in the cold. By the end of the book, you realize Cha-Cha doesn’t even remember it. He doesn’t even really want to apologize for it when he is reminded of it. He’s just like, “Whatever. You’re alive. You’re fine.” But when you hear it the first time, Cha-Cha is like the devil. And here [you] thought he was the best person in the book. That’s the one of the fun things. You create them and then you can poke holes in them with other characters.
Audience: I can talk to any of my siblings about something that has happened and our stories are so completely different. You did a great job with that.
AF: Thank you. There were supposed to be a couple more moments where that happens, where you question one person’s memory. Early on when Cha-Cha is first meeting with Alice, he has this memory of being the last one to clean up the kitchen at night and how he used to have to fight cockroaches. So then later there’s supposed to be a conversation with Francie where he brings that up and she’s like, “Mama was fastidious. We never had cockroaches. What are you talking about?” But it ended up being cut out. It’s interesting when you’re in a big family—any memory is up for debate. Nothing is certain. In a conversation a more manipulative sibling can convince you: “I didn’t even say that.” It’s like: “You did. I think?” It’s something that’s fascinating and frustrating about people who’ve known you forever and have so much history with you.
Audience: Who was your inspiration for Cha-Cha’s character?
AF: Actually in some ways, my older sister, who is three years older than me. But my brother is nine years younger than her, and then my younger sister is eighteen years younger than her. She used to play it up more in her twenties, that she was this great victim and had to be the family historian or whatever. In some ways, I think it was inspired by me imagining, “If she doesn’t get over this . . . ”
When I first moved away from home, I was just like, “I don’t live there anymore, so you figure out what we’re getting for Christmas and put my name on it.” If you want to be bothered being in a family, then you can’t expect one person to be the one who does all the work of being in the family. I think in some ways it was me thinking about siblings. Different people get different roles.
Audience: Is the haint symbolic of Cha-Cha’s father, or is that supposed to be left up to our imagination?
AF: Absolutely supposed to be left up to your imagination. One hundred percent. There is no one answer. I wanted it to be doing a lot of things. Not just one thing. I also didn’t want to solve what the haint is. Some people like to categorize this book as magical realism. I don’t know if it’s exactly magical realism as much as it’s a realist novel depicting characters who believe in ghosts. People believe in ghosts. Does the narrator necessarily believe in ghosts? Maybe, maybe not. The narrator is interested in the perception and interiority of the characters. Sometimes the narrator makes it seems like, “This haint is real.” And other times the narrator is like, “Well, according to this person, this is what happened.” And that’s because the narrator is not as interested in whether it’s real or not as much as how does seeing this thing affect these peoples’ lives? What is expected when you have a supernatural element in a book is a moment where you realize it’s actually not what it seemed like it was the whole time. I think that that is disingenuous to how a lot of people live their lives. A lot of people believe in ghosts.
Audience: Was that always part of the story?
AF: Yeah. The first chapter is the second chapter I wrote. The first chapter I wrote was Layla sneaking into the house at night with her flashlight after being evicted. I realized that it didn’t make sense to start with the quiet chapter and then go to the loud chapter. It made much more sense thematically to foreground all of these people, and then this one weird thing that happened, and then telescope into the smaller moment. But those were the first things I had before I had anything else. I had this woman sneaking in this house and then I had this family legend that happened in the same house.
Audience: Were you ever concerned that starting with a haunting was going to maybe mislead the reader into thinking that they were gonna read a straight-up ghost story?
AF: No. There was a lot of doubt in that first section. It’s always, “According to this sibling, this happened. Later, this sibling would say . . . ” When I only had those fifteen pages I snuck my way into this workshop in the summer in Iowa with ZZ Packer. She pointed out that I was doing half and half. I was both being certain and leaving doubt. And she was like, “No, you just need to do full-on doubt.” Even later if you reveal that it’s true, the doubt works on a level of narrative tension. If you put it as real in the beginning, then you have set up an expectation that every single page is gonna be fantastical.
Audience: Would you say that there is a main protagonist?
AF: I think there are two. I think it’s Cha-Cha and Layla. I think you can have more than one. I understand if readers think that Cha-Cha is because he gets the most page space. But, for me writing it, Layla is also the logistical heart of the book because the house is the center of the book in a lot of ways.
But the reason why it’s set over five weeks is because I decided that there had to be a finite amount of time that she could be in this house before something really bad happened or somebody found out about her. (Which is what happens, Cha-Cha finds out that she’s there.) In those five weeks, it’s very important that we see where Layla is on the continuum of getting her life together. Because Cha-Cha is the head of the family, there’s a way that we can think that he’s the main character. But it’s both of them. They’re doing different work.
Audience: How did you keep track of the characters while you were writing it?
AF: I just did. That family tree was the last thing I wrote because Jenna made me, my editor. I didn’t want to do a family tree. I was like, “People have to suffer through it. That’s part of the experience of being part of something so large is you have to just figure out a way to keep all these people in your head. And I also said something dumb in my email, like, “I also just don’t think it’s very literary to have a family tree.” So then she just sent me a list of books with family trees beginning with One Hundred Years of Solitude and I was like, “Oh, I guess I can’t argue with García Márquez.
Some people don’t look at it, but then other people have told me that they’re really grateful that it’s there. But I didn’t use that. I just remembered. At a certain point, I decided to change the names of some of the siblings we don’t actually see much of. Because with a family as big as mine, then you find out someone actually has that name. Quincy’s name used to be Jesse, which I really liked, and then my dad was like, “You know, you have a great-uncle Jesse.” And I was like, “Oh God, let me just take this name and make it another name.” That became confusing, especially because he only has a few little things that characterize him. I would have to remind myself, “Oh, he’s the new Jesse.” So I did have an index card with birth order and name.
Audience: Did you always know you were going to focus on Cha-Cha and Layla, or did you start with a different sibling?
AF: No. I always knew. I did not think there would be much Troy. There was actually, in some earlier drafts, much more Troy. And I realized he was trying to co–opt the story. But it’s not his story, so I cut a lot of him out.
Audience: One of the moments, for me, that was sort of surprising, was when Layla was successful in the casino. She won. You see her winning and as a reader, when you’re involved in a character, you want that to change her life in a positive way. I really love the way that you didn’t make her happy in the long run. It didn’t help her. And I was wondering if that was something that you always knew?
AF: I had always known that when she really needed the money, she wasn’t going to get it. And when she had accepted the fact that she had no money, she was going to get money. That was something that I had always known. Basically, you get what you want when you no longer need it. Subsequently, a friend of mine told me that that’s actually something that people talk about a lot in Gamblers Anonymous: feeling better about gambling when they lose all the money than when they win a whole bunch of money. There’s a weird, confused depression that can occur when you actually leave up. That’s why so many of them stay. There’s a different sort of satisfaction. It’s like a punishment that they think they deserve. Some gamblers, not all gamblers, they want to stay until it’s gone—which is really what she was trying to do, which is self-destructive. If she didn’t run into that guy, she perhaps would’ve stayed and then tried to lose all the money again.
Audience: So you intuited that gambling addict mind? Or did you research it?
AF: I researched a little bit about the tenets of Gamblers Anonymous. But I didn’t read a lot of firsthand testimonials of gambling addicts. I didn’t want to rely too heavily on pop psychology in the book or connect the dots about character behavior and what it means. When I decided certain things about her, that she had very specific rules that she followed, I just really had fun with that, deciding what her rules were. But as far as how the experience would actually affect her, I didn’t do a lot of research on that.
Audience: I wanted to know, what made you decide to add chapter titles?
AF: They were always there. I never wanted chapter numbers. I think from the very beginning I knew that I was gonna be shuffling around these chapters. I always wanted to have chapter names and not numbers just so that I didn’t get confused printing things out. Tonally, I thought, some of the chapter titles are serious, some of them are kind of tongue-in-cheek. I thought it was an opportunity, tonally, to play around with how readers read a section. There’s some sections that perhaps the chapter title makes it seem not as sad.
Audience: You talked about Alice. Her background is very unusual. What made you make that character?
AF: I wanted her to be a person that Cha-Cha had never experienced before. That’s part of her allure for him. She’s not what he expected. He expected her to be white. She’s not white. Then, once he found out she was black, he expected her to be black like him, and she’s not. She’s an atheist. She has all these ways that she is not what he expects and is exotic in a very boring way. But because of that, he projects onto her all of his desires for a life that’s not like his. She seems to be living a life that’s not like his. We find out later that they actually have some similarities.
Audience: When you were writing, did you write Cha-Cha’s story, and then Layla’s story? Did you just kind of go back and forth?
AF: I would write to a turning point: “We’re gonna start this chapter with Layla trying to figure out what happened to her unemployment. We’re gonna end with her having sex. Okay. How does that happen?” And then I would say, “Oh, what’s the last thing that happened to Cha-Cha? The last thing that happened to Cha-Cha is he went to see Francie. And Francie told him to get over his problems. Where does that leave him now?”
I worked like that. I didn’t write out one and then separate it.
Audience: It sounds like you know where you’re going when you start writing something, no?
AF: No, it’s really trial and error in a lot of ways. The chapter “Memories” that starts with Layla trying to be busy cleaning the house and ends with her pawning all the stuff and feeling bad about it—I didn’t know what was going to happen. I knew it was a chapter where she was going to be alone, save for the woman at the pawnshop. The Layla chapters were the most difficult because she talked to the fewest people. She also was always not being truthful when she was talking to people, or being squirrely, trying to avoid any sort of questions that she didn’t think she could answer. I had no idea what was going to happen in those chapters often.
Audience: She was kind of your wild card.
AF: Yeah.
Audience: How much of the overarching structure did you have mapped out from the beginning? Did you have a beginning and an end?
AF: No. I had a beginning. I knew I wanted a moment where Cha-Cha and Layla were both in the house. Troy wasn’t even supposed to be there, but Troy is Troy so he just shows up. But it’s useful because I really don’t know if I knew how to get out of there with them in a way that wasn’t hokey. I knew it would end with the party, and I had no idea what was going to happen in between all of those things.
Audience: At the end, were you supposed to know what was supposed to happen to Viola?
AF: The laws of nature state . . . that yeah. She’s gonna die, whether it’s gonna be in five minutes or five years.
Audience: And then with the house again?
AF: You want closure.
Audience: Yeah. I do at the ending.
AF: I really like books that push me out. For many reasons. But one is because I hate ending a book that I like. Especially if it ends where everything is tied up. I can’t even think about what people are doing now. I get bereft. I’m very sad afterwards. But if a book pushes me out a couple beats before then, then I feel much better about it. I wanted to write a book like that. Some people think that perhaps it was too many beats. But I had nothing else as far as things that needed to be tied up.
Audience: When I was getting close to the ending, I thought they would eventually sell the house and I thought she was gonna kick the bucket.
AF: Yeah, well then I think you should go with those thoughts. That’s probably what happened. For sure she kicked the bucket.
CV: You have a lot of characters in this novel. And a lot of them aren’t really explored. Are you done with the Turner family? Think you’ll come back?
AF: I’m done writing books about them.
Audience: I wonder if you’d talk about what you read while you’re writing a novel. Do you seek influence[s] while you’re writing?
AF: There was two of all the nonfiction books about Detroit I read that I actually bought and didn’t just rent from the library. They’re textbooks, so they’re kind of expensive. That was [Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes:] An Oral History of Detroit and then The Origins of the Urban Crisis, which I mentioned. I reread those books a lot, which seems really boring. When I felt stuck, I would open them up and read whatever. On the level of fiction, I didn’t necessarily read a lot of large family books or a lot of books specifically about the Rust Belt or Great Migration, but I did read and reread a lot of multi-POV novels, so that included Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. And then there were some books that I just kept for voice-iness, books that make me feel safe and good, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The only book that ends up in there, explicitly, is Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men.Some of them I read over and over, cover to cover. I would put Post-its when I read them, and then I would just go back through the Post-its when I felt stuck.
Audience: Since a lot of us here are writing our first novels, or probably will be before too long, do you have any thoughts, or wisdom, or advice on attacking the first draft?
AF: It just comes down to resilience and being okay with trial and error. Some people write an outline, and they can stick to it. But for me, it was understanding that you don’t know what’s not going to work until you do it. Sometimes, in an effort to make something that can be workshop-able, you do things that can actually kill a longer work. You try to solve every problem within a chapter. But literally, in a chapter, to keep people reading, you have to do the slightest bit of resolution. It can just be the difference between someone not having an idea at the beginning of the chapter, and then having an idea of some sort by the end of it. Then you’ve propelled people into the next chapter. That is something to be aware of. There’s a tendency to want to story-ify a novel chapter because you want to workshop it with people who are used to workshopping stories. The feedback you get—some of it’s not going to actually be relevant.
Audience: So what made you decide the title of the book itself, The Turner House?
AF: That was really a long trial and error thing. I’m not very good with titles. I’m pretty stubborn, but it’s funny how flexible I am with titles. I had a succession of bad titles.
CV: Oh, give us some.
AF: The one that it was when I sold it was Haunting Detroit. I don’t know how I felt about the vowel sounds in “haunting” and a gerund in general in my title. I think those two words together are playing into expectations people already have about the city instead of leaving room for people to come in with an open mind. There’s categories on Flickr: “haunting images of Detroit,” “decay—”
CV: That title sounds like a program on the Discovery Channel.
AF: Yeah. Thank you. So this [title] was a brainstorm between me, my agent, and my editor. There’s nice dynastic qualities. It also centers what the book is about in a lot of ways.
JG: Angela, thank you so much.
AF: Thank you. 