Much of the story of Detroit is located in real estate: a walled-up house is a walled-up narrative; a story is abandoned, kept in the family, taken over by a bank. Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House tells one of these stories. It spans more than fifty years in the history of the sprawling Turner family, from its patriarch’s northward migration in the 1940s to the mortgage crisis of the mid-2000s, and the impossible decisions its members are compelled to make. The novel was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for fiction and a New York Times notable book of the year.

Flournoy grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia University, the New School, and Southern New Hampshire University.

The interviewer, Jia Tolentino, is the deputy editor at Jezebel and a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

The following interview was condensed and edited from two phone conversations in January and February 2016.

Your dad, like a Turner, is one of thirteen. How do you think coming from such a big family influenced the way you think about family or about people in general?

The largeness of my family, and not just on my dad’s side, has something to do with the way people tend to say I’m “self-possessed.” I had five cousins at my high school, and though the situation was kind of cock-blocky—three of those cousins were guys that played football—I learned to never really worry about outside opinions.

I think that’s a good thing, if it can also come with a certain isolation. In a big family, you’re often assigned a role. And if you change from that role, if you grow up, you get hit with, “Oh, you’ve changed.” You want to say, “No, I was twelve when everyone decided who I was, and now I’m not twelve anymore.”

Did you write a lot as a child?

I did. I was an early reader, always at the library, and an early writer. I remember some anthropomorphized animals. My elementary school had a literary anthology, and I wrote about an elephant that was discriminated against because he had three legs.

As a precocious writer and reader, did you feel supported in school?

Yes. I always enjoyed school and found it easy—I had mostly Latina teachers, in a public school in Los Angeles County, and I never felt that anyone discouraged me from nerding out. My teachers let me turn in book reports for The Jungle in sixth grade; they never told me I was reading above my level.

That’s wonderful. Did you know then that you wanted to be a writer?

I never thought of being anything else. Throughout my life, I did a lot of those things where you have to write letters to yourself, and in these letters, I’m always saying, “I hope you’re still writing. I hope you’re making a living writing.”

That’s so funny and familiar to me. I remember being pretty aware from a young age that writing in general (and writing fiction in particular) is not a fixed, easy career path. Did you get any “Well, maybe you should think about law school” type of nudging?

When I started [undergrad] at [the University of Southern California], I was a journalism major because people in my family thought that was a safer bet. This was before 2008, to be sure, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate.

I think they’re right that journalism is safer, if not safe. “Safer than fiction writing” is saying basically nothing. Did you stick to the journalism track?

No. I realized I didn’t want to do it. I started taking creative-writing classes, and once I’d taken them all, I asked the faculty to let me do an independent study.

I was always expecting my stories to do what
a novel does, and they can’t.

What were the earliest stories you loved?

Junot Díaz’s Drown and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!—both of those collections, from the late ’90s—and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which I still think is one of the most perfect short stories ever written.

What do you think separates a work that you love deeply from a work that influences you and affects your own writing?

I don’t know. I guess it’s one of those magic things about consuming art: you can understand how two things are comparably good, but only one of them will strike a real chord, for reasons that are essentially ineffable and impossible to articulate.

How soon into college did you think about doing a master’s degree?

I didn’t know about MFAs until I took a workshop with T.C. Boyle, who has a certain way of making everything seem like “Oh, I just thought of this idea, and it’s not a big deal,” when actually it is. I was talking to him in office hours about what I was going to do when I graduated, and he said, “Maybe you should move to New York, and if you get laid off or bored, you should think about an MFA.”

So I moved to New York. And though I didn’t get laid off, a lot of my friends did: this was around December 2007, the beginning of the bloodshed. I was doing PR for this crazy place called Steve & Barry’s, where all the clothes were under $20—Sarah Jessica Parker at one point opened her own clothing line with us—and I was mostly planning events and getting clothes placed in magazines. And then the company went bankrupt, so I started looking into MFA programs.

You seem very much like a novel writer—like your style lends itself to expansion, not contraction. I’m wondering if the short story as the default training form in creative-writing programs cramped you or if it felt useful.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, after coming off a residency where a lot of people were trying to shoehorn themselves into a novel body, which isn’t always the right thing to do. We’ve all read novels by master short-story writers and been like, “Hmmm, this should have been thirty pages.”

Or seen a lackluster short story workshopped with the feedback “Maybe this is really a longer thing,” which—

Expecting a short-story writer to be able to write great novels is like expecting a great painter to have a facility with sculpture. It’s cool if they do, but if they don’t, it doesn’t make them any less of a painter.

What were your old short stories like?

I never really learned how to write a short story. Even in undergrad, I asked in that independent study to do a novel. That’s how I think: I want to look at something from all sides and exhaust all of my interest before I put this thing back down. I was always expecting my stories to do what a novel does, and they can’t.

The Turner House has such a spatial and temporal reach to it. I’m curious about the book’s originating thought and how it grew.

What led to The Turner House was this notion I’d had after visiting the house my father grew up in, in Detroit. The house was empty, and that bothered me. Parallel to that notion, I’d hit a point in my life where overachieving friends had houses and lives and roots, and I had none of those, and had no feasible plan to have any. So I started to think about homeownership, why it’s so important, how Americans came to value homeownership more than people in other countries.

I was in Marilynne Robinson’s workshop [at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop], and I decided to write about Lelah, this woman with a gambling addiction, sneaking back into the house.

At that point, did you know she’d be part of such a big family?

I wanted the number to be more than ten. The Turner House could very well have just been about Lelah: a novel about homeownership and gambling, how many people she’s hiding from, the way her family and social structures have changed. But one of the reasons I like novels is they don’t have to do one single job. Often, with the kind of novel I like the most, people will say, “It was so baggy,” or point to some structural or technical problem. And I can understand that, and still I think, Shut up, this book was perfect, this book was great.

Life is also essentially baggy.

The Turner House is a traditional first novel, a novel that is rooted in the author’s personal interests and histories. It was an opportunity for me to explore certain things about being from a big family in my own way.

How would you characterize your family?

I have a lot of different families, I’d say, with a lot of different personalities. But writ large, I would say humor is really important, and storytelling. I come from a family where people talk about things, where a certain amount of honesty and openness is paramount. They don’t hold grudges.

Where did you see yourself most within the Turner universe?

I think most of the people in my book, with the exception of Troy, are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to do better. I see myself in that quality. But the character that’s the closest to me is probably Francie: her lack of sentimentality, her general skepticism about everything, her very hard and fast boundaries.

You wrote a piece in the Atlantic about Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men. In that book, she writes, “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.” This helped you understand a question you were wrestling with for The Turner House: Who do you think you are to be writing this book about Detroit? You wrote: “I immediately felt the burden of representation. If I write this book, this will be the book that people look to. Who knows when the next novel set in Detroit and focused on working-class black folks will be?”

That burden of representation, as you note, is unfair: there’s a lot more pressure if you belong to or are writing about a population less represented than “white thirtysomething in Brooklyn.” I recently shelved a manuscript because of not being able to deal with this question personally. I’m bored by whiteness, but I grew up exclusively surrounded by it; I haven’t figured out a way to navigate that in fiction.

I think one of the things that helped me push through some of that doubt—besides those long quotes that I could put on my corkboard, like that Zora Neale Hurston one—was the fact that I had the advantage of not growing up around whiteness. I didn’t grow up in a majority-black community either; I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, around Mexicans and Filipinos.

Ah, my people.

Which?

Filipinos.

Okay, yeah. So, I was still a minority in some way in this community. But there was a lot of difference between people, generally; there was also a lot of room for similarity. This dynamic is flattened when the contrast is whiteness. When whiteness is absent, issues of identity do not get flattened in the same way. There’s room for more complexity.

It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized I grew up in a community where everyone at some point was colonized by the Spanish. There were ways in which that background set a different norm, in which we benefited from the fact that whiteness wasn’t around to make everything seem incorrect. It wasn’t incorrect to ask, “Which Michelle Garcia? The Mexican Michelle Garcia or the Filipino Michelle Garcia?”

I actually have cousins with the last name Garcia who live east of West Covina, and it feels good to be able to say that to you, knowing that you get how funny and also how unremarkable that coincidence is.

It’s interesting to see how these issues get reflected in every medium. Take Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which is filmed in my hometown. People are excited because there’s a hot Filipino guy as the lead, and I’m like, “Do you know how many hot Filipino guys wouldn’t talk to me in high school?” The lead in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is not the only one; he is well aware that he’s not the only one, and yet he does have to carry that burden of representation.

In writing The Turner House, it was less of a factor to imagine how whiteness would view me. What I worried about is what actual black people in Detroit would think of me, what the aunties around the United States would think—it was the aunties, in the end, who cared about me before anyone else cared about me. I didn’t really anticipate having to worry about the other burden of representation in order to do the story justice.

White writers don’t have to deal with this; they
enjoy an effectively unlimited pie.

What about after the book was published?

Speaking generally, with the reception of any published work, I think a lot of things that could stand on their own are held up and turned around so many times, examined for all the identity boxes they are checking and not checking. People forget that this is a human who created this with whatever background they have—

A person writing about what they know, not someone making a large-scale statement about their identity category.

—and, when a woman of color is having a moment, and I guess I’m having a moment, people often want you to step into the place of being the only one. I try to be conscious of that concept, which I’m very much against. I try to point people toward other women of color who are writing. Right now, for example, I’m reading Brit Bennett’s debut, The Mothers, which is really good, and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s debut, Here Comes the Sun, and Kaitlyn Greenridge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman.

That “only one” factor gets expressed so baldly. In my graduate program, people would get very pressed if there were, say, two non-American writers in a month in the New Yorker short-story section.

It’s such an illusion—that the slice of the pie will never get bigger and can never get bigger, and all we can talk about is who has the slice of the pie at any given moment. White writers don’t have to deal with this; they enjoy an effectively unlimited pie.

And this tends to turn into the idea that writers of color are in some sort of “identity corner,” whereas white writers just get to write about life. I will never forget one night in workshop when the professor asked our brilliant mutual friend Brit Bennett to explain what her story had to say about the black experience. Like her story had to be some after-school special, either harrowing or uplifting, just because her characters were black.

Right. Blackness is not a way of suggesting anything other than blackness; it’s just a way of zeroing in on a character, among many ways you zero in.

One of the reasons I love The Turner House is that the characters wear their identities so deeply and so lightly; to me, that’s the way identity actually feels. Other people have picked up on this. The Times review said:

“That Flournoy’s main characters are black is central to this book, and yet her treatment of that essential fact is never essentializing.”

And from the Millions:

“One of Flournoy’s great achievements is that she doesn’t draw attention to the fact that virtually every one of her characters is black. This is just part of the novel’s oxygen and furniture, a Detroit given. Therein lies its quiet strength.”

There’s an awkwardness, I guess, in announcing that a great strength of a book is that it does not announce blackness in the way outsiders have come to expect.

I really appreciated those reviews. The delicacy of these lines I think comes from the fact that the reviewers don’t want to just come out and say the equivalent of “This is the Filipino Michelle Garcia.” And so the acknowledgment that the characters are black becomes an entire acrobatic paragraph at the end of the review, whereas, at the beginning, you really could just say, “It’s a black family.”

In general, there’s a hesitancy to use “black” as a descriptor, which either points to a widespread anxiety about race or a subconscious belief that the descriptor “black” is pejorative. Or, maybe a third option—which is that you can’t say “black” at the beginning without the average white person tuning out immediately. I hope that’s not true; it might be.

It’s funny how things that you don’t think about become points of craft, points that other people bring up to you. I never really thought about the fact that, in my novels, I only describe people who are not black as raced. If you’re coming from a place where that’s a norm, like my characters do—Detroit is still very segregated—you could go days without seeing someone who’s not black. So that’s the only thing that makes sense for the book.

Are you working on a second novel?

I’m thinking about a second one, working on proposals for things. I’m teaching at several places right now, so I don’t know when I’ll have time to actually start writing. I don’t write every day unless I have something to be writing every day. I’m not an exploratory writer—I get too hard on myself in the process of exploratory writing.

Have you ever gone back and reread The Turner House outside of readings?

No. I had the strange and wonderful fortune to be on the Brian Lehrer Show once with Marilynne Robinson, who said that with every action a character takes, it has an echo, a cloud of other actions they didn’t take around it.

Now, I don’t know how many drafts she does. She’s so brilliant that she probably does just the one. But when I look at my fiction, the finished product, I see the decisions that were not made, the possibilities that were ignored. And so in that way, if I tried to read the book outside of a performative setting, I’d want to work on it.

That’s interesting. You don’t have the “I’m done with it forever” feeling. Instead, it’s “I could work on this forever.”

I don’t know where else the characters could go, that’s true. But on a language level, I’d still always remember what I wanted for a certain sentence. I’d want to keep working on it until it was exactly right.