Song Exploder - Book Exploder: Tayari Jones - An American Marriage

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels. She won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus. Her novel An American Marriage was an Oprah's Book Club Selection, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction. An American Marriage tells the story of Celestial and Roy, a Black middle-class couple living in Atlanta. Their lives are torn apart after Roy is wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit, and the middle of the book takes the form of letters they send each other while he’s in prison. In her discussion with Susan, Tayari discusses the letter Celestial sends to Roy to tell him she is leaving him. For more, visit bookexploder.com/episodes/tayari-jones.

You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write. I'm Rishi Kesh Your Way. And I'm Susan Orlean. In this episode, Susan speaks to Thayeri Jones, who won the Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel, An American Marriage. She also won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and An American Marriage was a selection for Oprah's Book Club. Susan, how did you end up picking this book? I was very attracted to the title as an American who is married. I loved the plain spokenness of the title, which I do think ends up being a very important part of the book, simply stating that this is an American marriage, even though as you read in the book, it may not fit your idea of what a conventional American marriage ends up looking like.

And that's a lot of what I think she's pushing us toward acknowledging and recognizing. Yeah, the specific American marriage in the book is that of Celestrel and Roy, who are a black middle class couple living in Atlanta. And then their lives get torn apart when Roy is wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit. And the two of you discuss a passage where Celestial tells Roy that she's leaving him while he's still incarcerated. It's in the form of a letter, which is always a really challenging way to write. and I think that Thayeri does it magnificently. Here's Susan's interview with Therary Jones. Hello.

Hey, Susan. Hey. This is me. My first question for you is, how did you choose this passage to be the one that we were going to kind of examine closely? What does this passage mean to you? Well, this passage was one of the hardest parts to write in the book

because I had never written a book where so much pushback in terms of my idea of plot. Just like in real life, as a woman, you can often get a lot of pushback for the way that you act out the plot of your own life. Just as Celestial is fighting for the right, the situation with her husband is not complex. He was arrested for a crime. He didn't commit. That's wrong. And there is really no nuance there. Like, that's a terrible thing that happened. but her response is nuanced. And the whole middle of the book are the letters they exchange while he's in prison.

And so this is the letter she writes when she says she can't be his wife. Dear Roy, this is a letter I promised I would never send. Before I go any further, I want to tell you that I am sorry. I want to tell you that even typing these words is killing me. I won't say that this will hurt me more than it hurts you because I know how much you're hurting every day, and no matter what is happening to me,

it will never compare. I understand that I'm not in the same agony as you are, but I'm in pain, and I cannot continue to live this way. Much of the pressure that I experienced writing this novel was how to make all the characters sympathetic, how could we make celestial sympathetic, even though she is defying our expectations

of the genre of this type of story, right? If you say you have a novel about a woman and her husband has been wrongfully accused, everyone expects the novel to be one woman's brave fight to free her man. Right. And so it is really the most controversial. And so I chose it because I revised this Dear John letter. I thought when I was writing this, that Celestial and me were in the same place. We were working so hard to be heard.

So she's fighting for her right to have a nuanced life while I was fighting for the right to have written a nuanced novel. That's really interesting. Because this isn't a simple right and wrong. This is about the complexity of every decision. Did you write the book in its chronological order the way it appears in the book, or did you write sections separately? You know, I actually wrote an American marriage from beginning to end, from the ruder to tutor from Celestial's point of view first. Wow, that's a huge change. It was a massive revision that was brought about when I heard Claudia Rankin give a reading, and she said, what happens to you, doesn't belong to you.

It's not yours, not yours only, or something like that. And everybody in this story needed to have a chance. Rory's perspective. This book took me six years to write because I wrote it. Oh, tell me more about that. Writing this particular section, was it multiple drafts? Multiple, multiple, multiple drafts. And it's funny because when I was writing the multiple drafts, I felt as though I were celestial.

Tiari, the writer, wrote multiple drafts, but Celestial, the character, also wrote multiple drafts, if that makes sense. Oh, it makes perfect sense. So you were experiencing it as if Celestial were writing this and crossing it out and starting again because she was getting the tone right. And you were getting the tone right for her. Right. I love that. It's like a Russian nesting doll of intention. I feel like in many ways this is a book where a boulder falls from the sky and crashes into this life.

And then people have to adjust to the boulder that crashed out of the sky. Yes, and a boulder is not a complicated thing. But the splinters, actually into the life, are many different shapes, sizes, complicated. is complicated. What we have here isn't a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart. It's your life, and we are not sharing ours. I blame it on time, not on you or me.

If we put a penny in the jar for every day we have been married and we took a penny away every day we've been apart, the jar would have been depleted a long time ago. How much is Celestial's voice your voice? Our voices are very similar, which is part of the reason why it hurts my feelings when people say they don't like her. She thinks like I think. For example, she loves to define terms, like she says to him, you know, a marriage is more than your heart.

It's your life. That's the kind of thing that I think about. And she and I have a lot of beliefs in common. One thing that really struck me is the counting of time, the way you count. age of a baby. I can't go on being your wife. In some ways, I feel like I never even got to try my hand at that role. We were only married a year and a half before lightning struck,

counting off time in months like you do with a baby. I have done my best to be married without actually being a wife for three years now. Do you remember writing that particular image? I do. I needed to underscore the brevity of this marriage. When I wrote the first draft, they had actually been married four years. But then I decided they should be married only 18 months, really to give more ambiguity to the kinds of choices they had to make. I kept saying, okay, they've been married 18 months.

They've been married 18 months. And then it just occurred to me that only time you use terms like 18 months or when you're talking about a baby, like you count babies by months all the way until they're two, right? You say 19 months, 20 months. Then once they turn two, you start counting them on. in years. And I thought that's exactly what this marriage is. This marriage is in its infancy. It's on the edge of its infancy, but it's still in its incidence. We'll be right back with more after this.

One thing that was really important in the passage is how Celestial signs off, which is love and I mean it. Celestial. So how many times did you draft that? It's funny because throughout the letters, I use the way. they sign off to show where the relationship is strong, where it's weak, to measure their different levels of commitment. And when she says love there, I thought about it, I thought he's going to, if I know he's going to roll his eyes to her saying love, she knows it. So I wanted to somehow underscore that. And so I tried in many ways like love always, love with a literal underscore under it, but I thought that wasn't voicy enough. Love, and I mean it, Celeste.

I said, oh, yeah, there we go. That's it. Most of her previous letters, she signs off yours, which obviously she's now saying, I'm not yours anymore. And yet she's emphasizing that she loves him. Because she does love him. What does she say, I love you, but I cannot be your wife. So she's separating those two things, right? The role of wife and the emotion of love, she doesn't think that they are. How did you feel when you wrote the first draft of this and then ultimately when did you know as you redrafted it so many times?

How did you know you got it right? I felt incredibly guilty when I was writing. I felt guilty as she would feel guilty to do this to Roy. I felt bad to injure Roy even though he and she, they are figments of my imagination, but I hated to do it to him. But I knew that I had it right. she said, I won't say that this will hurt me more than it hurts you because I know how much you're hurting every day

and no matter what is happening to me, it will never compare. I liked engaging with the cliche of this hurts me more than it hurts you and she's interrogating that nevertheless. She's claiming she's owning what she feels while also

acknowledging what he feels. When I got that part, I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, here it is. This is the tone I want. When she says, I will never abandon you. That filled me with tears. Did you get teary when you were writing this?

Oh, I got teary all. These people, these people put me through it. I was teary. I was stressed. These characters were the most demanding of any character. I was having such a hard time because I was trying to make her more sympathetic because, you know, there's all this pressure,

particularly on women characters to be sympathetic. And I started giving her problems because maybe if she had problems, then it would, you know, level out. And I realized that the fact of Roy's incarceration makes any other pleasure in the story kind of suspicious. There's no problem she can have. Things to matter in the face of what Roy is going through. And once I realized that, I stopped filing problems on her. Mm-hmm.

And did you feel liberated? or constrained by the format of writing in letters? The letters were Roy's greatest gift to. Celestial can only know of Roy's prison experience what he chooses to share in a letter. He protects her from the harsh details, therefore protecting me and also protecting the reader in making his time in prison.

He don't have kind of the day-to-day brutality and monotony that is what prison is all about brutality and monotony. The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can't bear to hear about my days and I can't bear to hear about yours. What was the initial impulse that led you to write this book? For my fourth novel,

I decided that now was the time for me to stop endlessly excavating my autobiography and write about something that I thought could be useful to the world. I was interested in the way that... I'd never written a novel with a social problem in mind, and I was trying to write about problems and their people, when a good novel should be about people and their problems. So I had a problem, I didn't have any people.

I was doing all this research. I was at Harvard. I had all these, like, angry, marked-up index cards where I was outlining the scourge of mass incarceration, but I didn't have a story. But then I went home to Atlanta, and while I was in the mall, I ran across a couple, and they were arguing. She looked beautiful. She looked fantastic belt, shoes, and he looked okay.

She looked fabulous. And I heard her say, Roy, you know you wouldn't have waited on me for seven years. And I thought she was right. Of course, he would not have waited on her seven years. And he didn't argue with that. He didn't say, yes, I would have, or how could you say that? Instead, he said, I don't know. over to talking about, this wouldn't have happened to you in the first place. And I was intrigued

because I thought he was entirely right, but I also thought she was entirely right. And when I have two people that disagree, but they're both right, I call that a novel. And now, here's Tyari Jones reading this passage from an American marriage. Dear Roy, this is a letter I promised I would never send. Before I go any further, I want to tell you that I am sorry. I want to tell you that even typing these words is killing me. I won't say that this will hurt me more than it hurts you because I know how much you're hurting every day and no matter what is happening to me, it will never compare. I understand that I'm not in the same agony as you are, but I'm in pain and I cannot continue to live this way. I can't go on being your wife. In some ways I feel like I never even

got to try my hand at that role. We were only married a year and a half before lightning struck, counting off time in months like you do with a baby. I have done my best to be married without actually being a wife for three years now. You're going to think that this is about another man, but this is about the two of us, about our delicate cord that has been shredded by your incarceration. At your mother's funeral, your father showed what the connection is between husband and wife. If he could have, he would have gone in the grave instead of her. But they lived under one roof for more than 30 years. In some ways, they grew together and grew up together,

and had she not died, they would have grown old together. That is what a marriage is. What we have here isn't a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart. It's your life, and we are not sharing ours. I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in the jar for every day we have been married, and we took a penny away every day we've been apart,

the jar would have been depleted a long time ago. I've been trying to find ways to add more pennies, but our visits in that busy room at that sad table send me home with empty hands. I know this, and you do too. The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can't bear to hear about my days,

and I can't bear to hear about yours. I am not abandoning you. I will never abandon you. My uncle will continue to file appeals. I will continue to keep your commissary up to date, and I'll visit you every month. I can come as your friend, as your ally, as your sister. You're part of my family, Roy, and you always will be.

But I can't be your wife. Love, and I mean it, Celestial. An American Marriage is available in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook. Tayari's website is taari-jones.com. You can visit us at bookexploder.com for more information. This episode was produced by Theo Balcom, Julia Botero, Susan, and myself. Our production assistant is Mary Dolan. Raina Takahashi created the Book Exploder logo.

Our episode artwork is by Paula Jackson, and I made the show's theme music. Book Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. Find out more at Radiotopia.fm. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. And I'm Susan Orlean. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.