An Afternoon with Yaa Gyasi

I am incredibly grateful to live in a community with an amazing public library. Our librarians are brilliant, our collection is vast and our programming is wide ranging. And once a year, our Friends of the Ridgewood Library hosts an author luncheon. Every year, the Friends bring remarkable authors to this event. I have been lucky enough to listen to Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Eagan and Nicole Kraus and missed greats like Min Jin Lee and Meg Wolitzer- but this year? This year, the committee hit it out of the park. Yesterday’s featured author was Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom.

I knew that Gyasi would be an impressive speaker. I mean how could she not be? Anyone brilliant enough to write Homegoing and then follow that masterpiece with Transcendent Kingdom, a book so completely different but equally wise was bound to be an interesting speaker but wow!

One of our amazing librarians, Roberta, interviewed Gyasi and then the floor was opened for questions. Sadly, I forgot a notebook and I didn’t want to spend too much time writing on my phone so I only jotted down a few snippets. I wish I could have transcribed the full hour to share with you because we were hanging on every word Gyasi said. I was not surprised by how smart her responses were but I was shocked that someone so clearly brilliant was simultaneously so human, so down to earth and so funny.

Here are a few pieces that I found particularly interesting…

Gyasi moved a ton as a young child while her father sought a tenure track position and the first thing her family would do in a new town was find the library. She can still remember librarians questioning her ability to read each giant stack she checked out within the two week limit but she did it every time :)

Gyasi submitted her first piece for publication at the age of seven to the Reading Rainbow young writer’s contest. I have forgotten the name of the piece but it was designed to convince her parents to get a family dog. She said that she did not win the contest nor get a dog.

Reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in an AP Lit class in high school was life changing for Gyasi. Our oldest daughter, Caroline, read Beloved this semester and because of her, I am reading my first Morrison right now. Seems like when I finish Beloved, Song of Solomon should be next on my list.

A member of the audience asked Gyasi how she took care of herself while researching and then writing a story as heart wrenching as Homegoing. Her answer? Eating good food, watching bad TV and going to therapy. I have often thought about how hard it is to read about topics like slavery but somehow this was the first time I had thought about the toll this process must take on the writer. I thought Gyasi response was so perfect and good advice for all of us to take!

I loved Gyasi’s response to the question of how we make sure that this generation of children, so distracted by technology, can grow in to readers. Her answer is the same one I give all time. Children do what we do. If we want our children to read, they need to see us reading. It is both that simple and that complex.

Gyasi is currently reading The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang and The Return of Ferez Ali by Aamina Ahmad.

And in response to the question of ‘what are you working on next’, Gyasi was super charming. She said she was superstitious about answering that question but that ‘something was happening.’ And that was enough to make me happy.

I decided not to ask a question because I often have a hard time editing myself once I get a microphone in my hand. I think I would have gushed embarrassingly about how much Homegoing taught me and then probably asked Gyasi for bad tv recommendations. But… when the program ended, I introduced myself and took the opportunity to tell Gysai that Homegoing taught me more about intergenerational trauma than any other work I have read. Then I did gush a little embarrassingly but she was completely gracious and I am so glad to have met her.

Afternoons like yesterday remind why I love books and reading, readers and writers. Thank you to Yaa Gyasi for coming to Ridgewood and thank you to The Friends of the Ridgewood Library for such an amazing event. blah