Tayari Jones stopped by Late Night to discuss her latest novel, Kin, with Seth Meyers.
Jones’ novel, published last month by Knopf, follows the friendship between Vernice and Annie, two women who grew up in a small Louisiana town in the 1950s and lost their mothers when they were children. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “beautifully written and powerfully compelling.”
Meyers said he had read that Kin was not the novel Jones initially set out to write.
“That’s why it took me eight years,” Jones said. “I had a contract to write an entirely different novel. It was supposed to be a modern novel, hip, about Atlanta and gentrification, but, like my students would say, The book was not booking.…It felt like I was on a blind date with a good idea, but there was no chemistry.”
Meyers asked Jones if she thought the story in Kin was in her mind all along.
“I don’t know if it was in my mind the whole time, but it had arrived, and I started writing about these two best friends, and they were living in the 1950s,” she said. “I thought, Well, that’s weird, because I believe myself to contain multitudes, but I do not believe myself to contain a historical novel.”
Asked how her publisher reacted to her informing them that she would be turning in a different novel than originally pitched, Jones said, “I didn’t tell them. I just gave it to them and ran out the room.…I was nervous. It was like they had ordered the salmon, and I gave them the steak.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
