Brit Bennett’s debut novel has stayed with me since I first read it, the words and the intimacy of the prose seeping into my pores. This is a novel about so many things — mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, grief, faith, community, Southern California, and how some relationships last a lifetime. The story begins, though, with a passionate relationship between an ambitious girl with a secret that could keep her from realizing her dreams and a boy whose dreams ended before they really began.
During her senior year of high school, Nadia Turner has recently lost her mother when she meets Luke Sheppard, the preacher’s son from the church her family attends, Upper Room Chapel. When Nadia learns she is pregnant with Luke’s child, she decides to have an abortion because she is headed to college — and so much more than the life she is leading in Oceanside, a town outside San Diego. After her relationship with Luke ends, Nadia spends the summer before college developing a deep friendship with Aubrey, another young woman from her church, who is living with her sister because Aubrey’s mother has chosen a man over her children.
As the relationships grow and shift between Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey over the years, we also follow the story of the church community and “the Mothers,” who see everything and know everything about everyone in the Upper Room community. There is a real tenderness to how Bennett tells this story and to how she writes these characters who are so richly fleshed out, so unbearably human. Take, for example, when Nadia spends time with Aubrey, Aubrey’s sister Monique, and Monique’s partner Kasey. She observes, “Monique and Kasey’s love for Aubrey hung in their eyes, and even though it wasn’t meant for Nadia, she inched closer, holding her hands up to the warmth.” There is so much want in this moment, and really, it is this want for love, for the warmth of belonging to other people, that is the heart of this novel.
I had the opportunity to talk on the phone with Brit Bennett just before her novel was released. Over the course of a half hour, we talked about so much, including the challenges of book touring, how she created a sense of place in her novel, how the story came to be, and what influences her work.
The Mothers
By Brit Bennet
0:00:
Roxane Gay: The Mothers is coming out very soon. [Ed. Note: The book , as of this interview’s publication.]How are you feeling?
Brit Bennett: [Laughs.] I’m feeling pretty nervous. It’s my first book, and I’ve wanted to write a book since I was a little kid, so it’s pretty surreal that there are going to be real people out there reading it. But I’m also very excited, and people who’ve read it so far, I’ve heard some . It’s been encouraging and building up a little bit of confidence. But yeah, this whole experience has been really crazy from start to finish, so I’m just trying to kind of relax and enjoy the ride.
RG: Enjoy the calm before the storm because it’s about to get crazy.
BB: [Laughs.] I’m looking at my poor schedule, and I don’t even know how … it’s three weeks, which is not as long as some tours, but this is like a different city every day so it’s gonna be interesting.
RG: Are you looking forward to going on tour?
BB: I’m really looking forward to meeting readers and people who don’t know me and have no stake in how the book does and just see how they react to it. That’s going to be really fun. I get to go to some cities that I have an emotional attachment to. I have some family that lives in Houston and so all of my cousins are going to show up, and that’s going to be pretty ridiculous, but fun. And I get to go back to Ann Arbor where I went to grad school, so that’s going to be fun too.
RG: I love touring. You’re gonna have a blast. The audience can be so kind and so receptive. The people who are going to take the time to go to a reading are passionate book people.
BB: I saw you when you read in Ann Arbor a couple of years ago. You read some work that was really intense but also you were very funny and able to work the crowd in a way I remember really admiring and being like, oh this is like a fun reading.
RG: Thank you! I try to make it fun because most of my writing is incredibly dark. Also, because I hate sitting in readings that are not good. I don’t need you to put on a show, but I do need you to engage me in some way.
BB: Yeah. That makes sense.
RG: So, let’s talk about your book. How did you come up with The Mothers?
BB: I grew up between two different churches. My mom is Catholic, so I went to mass with her when I was young. My dad is Protestant, so I went to his church. At first, we would just go to his church for Christmas and Easter and those types of things. We would go to mass the rest of the time. I’ve always been sort of interested in churches as these places that can be so different. Those were both spaces that are worshipping the same god, but are doing it in such different ways and such different people were going there. The idea of the church mothers and using them in a way to frame the book was something that developed later, branching out from just focusing on these young people and thinking of the church community as a whole.
RG: So you have this church community that’s very tight-knit and in the middle of that you have this love story between Nadia and Luke. Why did you choose two young people to tell this story within a story?
BB: Part of that came from just being a young person in this church and being curious about these people I would see around me and just thinking of, like, what is that experience of sort of being young — going through your adolescence, making these bad decisions — against the backdrop of this church that’s watching your every move.
That was something that was always kind of creepy to me and also very intriguing — how the decisions everyone my age was making would play out under such scrutiny. Particularly Luke being a pastor’s son, this person who always has people watching him and people are always kind of concerned about what he’s doing even though he’s just a regular kid. Part of it kind of came from that space.
“Representation was something I had to seek outside of my education, but it was something that was very important to me when I was developing into a reader and eventually into a writer.”
RG: We talk a lot about diversity in publishing and diversity in terms of representation, and here you write a story about a black community. What kinds of things did you read growing up that influenced you? Did you find representation in books that worked for you?
BB: I had to find it myself or my parents lead me to it. I definitely didn’t see it in my education. My parents were always very on top of that. I remember they always had books by black authors on the bookshelves. The first author I really loved was Toni Morrison, but she was an author it took me a while to kind of understand. I remember I started with The Bluest Eye, which is not the most accessible book. I was like, there’s a black girl on the cover of this book … I want to read it.
My parents were always very cognizant about making sure we saw movies with black characters in it, that we read books with black people in it or read books by black authors. Representation was something I had to seek outside of my education, but it was something that was very important to me when I was developing into a reader and eventually into a writer.
RG: How do you think about representation as a writer? Is it something that’s on your mind when you’re writing black women and black men?
BB: It’s definitely something on my mind. Overall, I want to write characters that are complicated and flawed, but I’m always thinking about the stereotypes or the conventions that you have to push against when you’re creating characters.
I set my book in the town where I grew up, which is not a place that people write about a lot in general, um — Oceanside or really San Diego, for that matter. I also don’t think San Diego is a place where people really imagine black people living, per se. I remember I had a teacher who told me, “I’ve never read a book about black people in San Diego.” That was something I was always intrigued about because I went to a high school that was pretty racially diverse. Not a ton of black people, but very diverse with a lot of Filipino people, a lot of Samoan Pacific Islanders. That was something that was very normal to me when I was growing up, and it was something I did want to represent in the world of my book.
RG: How does Southern California and the idea of place inform your writing?
BB: That’s a good question. Part of it is that diversity. I remember having somebody ask me why there were certain racial groups mentioned in the book and I was like, “because those are people who live there.” Is that something that needs to be justified? That’s one way place comes through; the experience of being black in a place that’s not majority black, but also that’s not necessarily majority white, is something that is very distinct to where I grew up, particularly in San Diego. There is a sort of dichotomy of black and white that makes up the landscape, but that was not necessarily what I saw growing up, so I wanted to expand that.
RG: In so many ways, this is a novel about grief and motherless girls trying to make their way in the world. I was really struck by the empathy you had for these young women and Luke and the choices that they make over the years. How did you find a way to balance their flaws with the goodness in them and to also tell this story about grief?
BB: That’s something that developed over time. The more time I spent with the characters, the more they became more complicated people. Luke expanded the most. Originally he was this character who was just relieved that Nadia had this abortion and that was his role, to be this sort of obstacle for her to overcome. As I kept writing, I realized that choice felt kind of flat and easy to me. That’s how we might expect a guy his age to react, and that was boring to me. So I wondered, well, what if he has a more complicated reaction to this, and where can I go with this character then?
RG: The Mothersspans nearly a decade. What kinds of things did you have to keep in mind as you brought Luke, Nadia, and Aubrey forward through time?
BB: Originally the book all took place in that first summer where Nadia has the abortion. As I grew older, I became more interested in what the characters would be like beyond their teens and what they would be like into adulthood. I was also thinking about how those relationships would be challenged and would change as you grow older and you grow apart from people, but you still have this sense of love and loyalty toward them. Who were the types of people they would be? What would they want? How would they feel towards each other as they have time and distance between them?
RG: How long did it take you to write The Mothers?
BB: Seven or eight years. I was working on it, starting it in my late teens and then worked on it when I was an undergrad and then was able to finish it when I was finishing up grad school. I was fortunate to have a lot of mentors who read these really early drafts and gave me advice but also encouragement to just keep working on it.
“[Empathy is] a quality that I strive for in my life and I also strive for on the page — considering where other people are coming from, considering their perspective.”
RG: What was the most difficult part of writing this novel?
BB: Revising it for that long, because it changed so much every time I revised it and like every time I fixed a problem I would create a new problem. [Laughing.] So I was kind of running around, putting out fires and setting new ones that I had to then put out later. And part of it was that when I first started working on the novel, I was very young and didn’t know what I was doing at all. I had to wait for some of my skill set to catch up with my ambition for the book.
RG: Do you prefer revising or do you prefer writing?
BB: I’m working on a first draft right now of my next book, which is making me realize how much I actually did sort of enjoy revising, because at least there I have some baseline — there was something I was starting with. I haven’t worked on a first draft of a novel from scratch in so long, so I’m getting frustrated with myself about things and I’m like, “there’s no possible way I could know how to do this yet because I haven’t written it.” I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know who these people are. There’s something that’s exciting about that, to do that again, but there’s also something that is frustrating me.
RG: What is the next project?
BB: It’s a book about sisters. It’s set in Louisiana in the past, and that’s all I know so far. [Laughs.] But yeah … I’m working on it, and it’s posing some new challenges because it’s set in a time in which I was not alive. It’s set in a place where I have not lived. It’s creating some logistical issues in addition to the fact that it’s just like a whole new world that I’m trying to figure out and inhabit.
RG: I can imagine. Figuring out a new book is always a thrill, but it’s a challenge nonetheless. Who are some of your creative influences?
BB: Toni Morrison. I love her. It goes without saying that she’s the greatest living American author. I really love Jesmyn Ward … Salvage the Bones. I loved her work and her nonfiction also. She does a great job of empathizing and humanizing characters that a lot of people are quick to dismiss. Like in Salvage the Bones, the idea of dogfighting, there were so many people who were dismissing the book based on the fact that there’s dogfighting in it. But she was able to humanize that community so fully in a way I really admired. I also love Dorothy Allison. She conveys brutality in this really beautiful way and, again, is able to humanize these really poor, rural white communities that people are often very quick to sort of dismiss. James Baldwin, I love — nonfiction and his fiction. Those are just some of the authors that I look to.
RG: What do you like most about your writing?
BB: The thing I’m most proud of about my writing is that I try to be empathetic. That’s a quality that I strive for in my life and I also strive for on the page — considering where other people are coming from, considering their perspective. That’s one of the most fun parts of the writing, inhabiting other people’s worlds and thinking about how other characters might see themselves, even if it’s not the way I’m kind of seeing them. That’s something I hope comes through with my writing.
