In Kin (Knopf, Feb. 24), the acclaimed author of An American Marriage again offers a captivating narrative rich in both emotional depth and social insight. Set against the fraught landscape of the Jim Crow South, the story traces the bond between two best friends as life pulls them from their small Louisiana hometown in very different directions. Raised by a no-nonsense aunt after her mother’s death, Vernice sets her sights on Spelman College and the opportunities that an education will offer her, while Annie’s search for the mother who abandoned her takes her on a more precarious journey. Speaking from her home in Atlanta, Tayari Jones reflected on how her own experience at Spelman shaped her latest novel and the lives she wanted to honor in writing it. “We don’t really talk about the people who lived on the periphery of the Civil Rights Movement. I also wanted to give credit to the transformative power of higher education, of historically Black colleges, and this rare bird of a historically Black women’s college.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First, I want to let you know that I loved this book so much. I did not expect it to be so funny. 

No one has mentioned that. 

Really? I wonder if it’s because you deal with some heavy topics here and people are afraid to say that they laughed while they were reading.

I do think that when we talk about books in the current media landscape, it’s such a compressed conversation, and the people who talk to me about the book want to do so in a way that they think will be helpful to the book and to me. I am a woman writer, and we are constantly aware of the extent to which we are not taken seriously—as writers, as thinkers, even as people.

Certainly, there have been times in my life when I’ve let my thoughts about reception interfere with my process. And that has never worked well. I only can get the book written when I let that go. So I understand that an interviewer might not want to dwell on how funny the book is, but they could at least tell me!

Well, we don’t have to dwell on it either, but I’m glad I mentioned it. I especially enjoyed Aunt Irene. All the secondary characters in this book are terrific, but she might be my favorite. She says over and over again that she’s not good with children, but she does her very best to raise Vernice.

We have this myth that if a woman says she doesn’t plan to mother any children, somehow the presence will transform her into someone else—in this case, someone this woman has distinctly said she is not. It’s a matter of personality, right? It really is. I do think that Vernice grew on Irene. I think Irene did care for Vernice, and she took care of Vernice. But Vernice didn’t make a mama out of Irene.

While I was getting ready for this conversation, I read an interview you did about An American Marriage with the Paris Review. You said something that I found really striking: “When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a book about mass incarceration, and mass incarceration is not a plot. It’s not a story. It’s not a character.” That captures so much of what I appreciate about both these books. You’re talking about serious social issues, but you do it with story. Can you talk about the role of research in Kin?

A lot of the research I did was about Spelman College. As an alum, I thought I knew the history of the school quite well. In fact, I was class historian my freshman year! But when I read a wonderful memoir by Dovey Johnson Roundtree called Mighty Justice—I wrote the foreword—I realized how much I didn’t know. Also, I’ve moved back home to Atlanta and there are a lot of women around me who are about the age of my characters, many of whom attended Spelman College. I’ve been able to get a lot of the details of their lives, details that aren’t really recorded anywhere.

I’ve discovered that there was a lot more class diversity at the school in the 1940s and ’50s than I thought. Spelman had a reputation as a place for young women from fairly well-off families who were looking for husbands. Spelman, like a lot of the HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities], did provide a service for the Black middle class, but they also created the Black middle class. That’s part of our history, too, but I think it’s gotten lost in favor of this mystique about Spelman women.

In reality, some of the young women who went there worked full time doing domestic work to pay for it. A lot of them came from these little towns. I met a woman who is 97 years old now. And she told me she arrived at Spelman College with every dime her family and community had in a sock. A sock! And she took this sock to the president of the college, who took the sock, emptied it out, didn’t count the money, returned the sock, and asked this young woman, “Where are you staying?” And this woman answered that her family knew some people in Atlanta, and she thought she’d be able to stay on their couch. The president said, “No, you’ll stay in a dormitory.” This woman didn’t know what that word meant, but she knew it had to be better than a couch. And now that woman has a PhD. She’s a Shakespeare scholar, no less. I just really wanted to give some respect to women like her.

That’s an amazing story.

I will say, one thing that was hard for me, writing a book set in the ’50s and ’60s, was writing about a time when women did not have access to safe and reliable contraception. The characters in this book are constantly talking about and worrying about getting pregnant. As someone born in 1970, someone who came of age when contraception was in regular usage, it was hard for me to get my head around the ways in which women’s lives were determined by their inability to control their own reproduction. I really wanted to underscore that. The tragedy in the book is personally tragic, but it’s also culturally tragic that women did not have access to the health care they needed to live their lives. That was important for me to communicate.

Is there anything else you want to say before we close?

People always ask me about advice for young writers, which, honestly, isn’t all that interesting to me. I’m much more interested in talking to older people who have stories to tell. I know everybody likes to say that writers should write every day. And I do think that you should write frequently and regularly, but listen: All the things that keep you away from your writing are also the things that enrich your writing: your job, your kids, elder care, being involved in your community. All these things enrich your writing. So instead of looking at them as challenges, think of them as your superpower. I don’t want to read a book by someone who has nothing to do but write. I don’t want to read a book by someone who’s in their pajamas all day. I want to read a book by someone who is out in the world leading a meaningful life. So if you can just take time to write regularly, the book will get done, the pages will accumulate. But don’t think that your life is keeping you from telling your story.

Jessica Jernigan is a writer in Michigan.