A town that was so invested in lightness that it wasn’t just a matter of preference, it was something that was almost genetically engineered. She told me about a town she remembered hearing about when she was a child, where everyone intermarried so their children would just get lighter and lighter. How did your mother’s upbringing in the Jim Crow south inspire the novel? It feels as surreal as I think you’d imagine. It’s an honour to be mentioned in the same sentence as two of our finest writers ever. How do you feel about the tone and style of your writing being compared to novelists such as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison? It explores racial identity at a time when people are really eager to read and engage with conversations about that, which is true all around the world as you see with these protests in all these countries. I think there’s a larger social context into which the book entered the world. Why do you think it is resonating right now? It’s a story about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who decide to live their lives on opposite sides of the colour line – one as a white woman and one as a black woman. The people who are No 1 are household names, like Stephen King! We were optimistic, but I never imagined that. It was maybe 5 o’clock in the evening and I was just sitting on my couch, and my editor called out of nowhere. What were you doing when you heard the news? And that was on top of your book debuting at No 1 in the NYT bestseller list.
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