Tayari Jones on friendship, writing, and choosing your ‘Kin’

Hey, it's me, Peter Sagel, host of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me. It's leaf peeping season, so why not peep our weekly news quiz while you're at it? We got comedians, celebrities, and games to help laugh about the week's news, and you can listen while you're spicing your pumpkins, whatever people do. Listen every week to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is novelist Tayari Jones.

She wrote her first novel more than two decades ago, but it was her fourth, an American marriage that put her into the national spotlight. When it came out in 2018, Oprah chose it for her book club. And Barack Obama put it on his reading list. It went on to win the Women's Prize for Fiction and has been published in more than a dozen countries, praised as a compassionate portrait of love and justice. By any measure, Tayari Jones had arrived, until she hit a wall, spending years on a new project that just wouldn't come together.

During that time she was diagnosed with Graves' disease, and her heart rate was so high she nearly had a stroke. Even as her vision suffered, though, she put an eye patch on and kept writing. And what came out on the other side is Kin, her latest novel set in 1950s Louisiana and Atlanta. It's about two girls, Bernice and Annie, who grow up next door to each other without their mothers. One mother was murdered, the other simply left.

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