With Family Lore, a magical saga centered on a family of Dominican American women, Elizabeth Acevedo takes greater narrative risks, reaches deeper into family dynamics and finds an expansive new register for her astonishing storytelling.

Your first book, The Poet X, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. What did that accolade mean to you as a writer, and how did it change your career?
I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time the kind of propulsion that a major award like the NBA can have on someone’s career. It put my work under a particular kind of scrutiny. I’ve always wanted my next work to be better than my last, but it’s hard to hold every future book to the success of my debut. My debut achieved accolades I may never see again. That’s just the truth of it. 

But I still have a lot of stories to tell. I’ve had to put in effort to be unswayed by external validation as it pertains to any projects since. What I’m currently making doesn’t grow under the shadow of what my first book did, and it’s been critical I don’t make comparisons. I will forever be grateful to the judges of the National Book Award and the merit they saw in The Poet X. It’s not hyperbole to say that award changed the course of my life because of the doors it opened. 

“Poems are like cats. . . . Maybe they want to be in the same room as you, but they’re fine in the corner by themselves, and when they eventually want attention, they’ll piss on your bed and let you know.”

You’re known not only for your novels but also for your poetry. What do you feel you’re able to achieve with poetry that you can’t with fiction? What does the format of a novel allow you that poetry doesn’t?
Ah! I love this question. I think poetry is interesting for me because it’s my most patient kind of writing. I don’t believe in rushing a poem. It can arrive over long lengths of time, one line on one day, an image on another. Poems are a way of thinking, and I don’t have to turn to paper right away for them to begin composition. Poems are like cats. They are independent, OK being alone for a while. Maybe they want to be in the same room as you, but they’re fine in the corner by themselves, and when they eventually want attention, they’ll piss on your bed and let you know. Poems are great containers for an urgent and visceral moment and emotion. I need to shift how I see the world to give language to a poem. 

The novel, however, requires me to sit with the character and actions daily. To catch the rhythm of the story, I have to show up again and again, or I lose the thread. The novel doesn’t tolerate being ghosted. I need to pet it daily or it’ll run away. I like that novels allow for ensemble truth-telling. I think that’s what I most often chase in a story—the many versions of honesty and humanity that can exist in one specific world, in one specific moment in time.

Read our starred review of ‘Family Lore.’

You’ve made it clear that one of the most important things for you to capture as a writer is what is true, even if it isn’t the literal truth. Can you expand on this?
In my writing, I’m less concerned with how certain actions happened than I am with the feelings that said actions caused, and how these feelings change the arc of how someone thinks of themselves or others. My stories are trying to capture the fault lines in everyday people and how those cracks occurred and whether or not they can be mended. But I don’t think truth is singular or linear. It’s an assemblage of experiences and interconnections where we make meaning. Sometimes folks try to preserve a memory in amber, and it can be a defining memory, but then you speak to the other party of that experience (if there is one) and they have a wholly different way of seeing the world. Memory is messy. How do we make sense of the distance between when something happened and where we are now, when we might have new information about ourselves and the world? That space is where I want to write into as I mine human dynamics. 

Your previous work has been written for young adult readers. What was your first experience writing a novel meant for adults like? Are there any ways in which writing for adults versus teenagers posed new challenges (or afforded new opportunities)?
I like to think of my writing as having different registers. I don’t think the note where my writing is located has changed; I write family stories about messy parents and children and the aspirations of immigrant and first-gen folks to find purpose and self-love. At least I think I do. But the register for the adult novel climbed a bit higher. It let me be spicier in terms of how I discuss sexuality and sexual experiences.

On a formal level, there are ambitions in how Family Lore is constructed that I think would have been a huge ask for young adult readers: time jumps, long asides that break up the narrative, six characters in close third-person, a first-person point-of-view narrator, poetry, historical research. While I like to challenge my younger readers, I’m mindful of still being welcoming. I know I’m requiring adults to do a lot of work in Family Lore, and I’m less concerned with them finding it too hard. The book won’t be easily consumed by folks who don’t do the work. 

In your author’s note, you mention that you hate the idea of defining the purpose of a book (or what it is “about”) before you’ve actually written it. For you, the act of writing is what allows the purpose or meaning of a story to come to light. Were there any moments while writing this novel when you found yourself surprised or staggered by something you put on the page or how the story evolved?
I think wanting to be delighted by where the writing goes is one of the reasons I struggle with plot. Even if I have an idea of the pivotal events, I discover so much while getting the characters from one place of action to the next. Often my favorite parts of the novel are those in-between moments I hadn’t accounted for. In Family Lore I don’t think I realized how much the love and protection between the women was going to be central. In many ways, romantic love fails or is incomplete for the majority of the characters. But the sibling and cousin dynamics offer a tenderness and safety net where romantic love falls apart. I needed to write these women’s sometimes bumbling efforts to show up for one another to realize that they are the love they’ve been striving for. 

There are, of course, lines and ideas that I didn’t know I’d have before I began writing. I had a myomectomy in 2021 that left me feeling alien in my body. In the novel, the character Ona has a myomectomy, but as I was writing her, I began to touch on light and what it means for light to enter a body where incisions were made. It’s not how I’d thought of surgery myself. But in her voice, I arrived at a new lens of considering what had gone wrong—and right—in my own fibroid removal. Moments like that happened a lot. I think I’ll know what I feel about something, but then the character twists the event in their own mouth, and I need to make room for a new way of approaching the narrative.  

The topic of family dynamics, particularly between sisters and mothers and daughters, is one that you’ve explored in several of your novels, including Family Lore. What is it about female family relationships that fascinates you so much, and why do you think they have such universal appeal and resonance among readers?
I write what haunts me. The family I come from and the families I grew up around—including extended family—practiced a good amount of enmeshment. In trying to piece apart my self-identity and self-worth, I had to undo threads that bound me to others. It was—and is—garbage dumpster work. It’s sifting through so much junk I carry that doesn’t innately belong to me. It’s reconsidering what it means to be a part of a community for yourself, not how perfectly you can perform yourself. I still don’t recognize sometimes how I’m thinking of every single person in my life and whether or not they’ll approve. So my novels agitate these webs because my mind agitates those webs. I think what Family Lore does that’s special is it reaches farther back than any of my other books to show historically how these dynamics of dysfunction were created within a family and are being undone or at least questioned.

One core feature of Family Lore is that nearly all of the women exhibit a preternaturally special talent or skill, from being able to foresee death to having an irresistible way with limes. If you could grant yourself with a special ability, what would it be and why?

I used to say teleportation would be the superpower I would want, but I think that’s when I had permeable boundaries and an inability to say no to things when all I wanted was to stay my ass at home. I was very much into hustle early in my career. I was holding a hot iron and striking my little heart away. It was exhausting to feel like my professional success had an expiration date, and my desire for teleportation was often because I was traveling so extensively that I was missing a lot of important moments with family and friends. 

These days I would want the ability to fall asleep instantaneously. My anxiety is always worse at night, and my anxiety worsens the less sleep I have—it’s a conundrum. Being able to turn the light switch off in my brain and have deep, restorative rest seems like it’d be such a subtle but game-changing talent—much like the quiet magic of the women in the novel. 

You’ve revealed that Family Lore is perhaps your bravest novel. In what ways did writing this novel require exceptional courage from you?
I touch on a lot of taboo and sacrilegious subjects in the novel. And while the novel intentionally meanders structurally, I’m very direct in how things like porn addiction, infidelity, emotional abuse and sex are approached. I think this book is demonstrative of my being less concerned with being liked, or with earning love, and more of my groundedness in what needs to be said in this particular moment. To say that which only I can say, even if it offends someone or causes them to see me as less than perfect. So yes, maybe it’s the book I’ve written most bravely.

Without giving too much away (and echoing something you mention in your author’s letter), the finale of Family Lore feels as much like a beginning as it does an ending. Could you see yourself revisiting these women again in the future and continuing their saga?
Ah! I love the Marte women so much. And I had so much writing that didn’t make the story and so many places I could see these characters going. That said, no. My rule for a book is like my rule for exes: I don’t double back once the story is done.

Author photo of Elizabeth Acevedo by Denzel Golatt.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the publication of Ayana Mathis’ next book, you’re not alone. The author herself was eager to finish The Unsettled, her sophomore novel. However, as Mathis explains during a Zoom call, the book—and particularly its characters—had other plans.

“There’s a really lovely origin story about The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” says Mathis from her second home in the Hudson River Valley, where she went to escape record-breaking temperatures in New York City. Mathis began writing her 2012 debut, which was a New York Times bestseller and the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, when a friend suggested several of her short stories could work as a book. The Unsettled, however, had no such beginnings. In fact, Mathis can’t recall the exact moment she knew what she was writing. “It was just a very long journey of becoming what it is,” she tells me. “I was writing around inside of it for a really long time.”

What The Unsettled became is a gripping novel about mothers and children, past and present, and the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. It opens in mid-1980s Philadelphia, where an unaccompanied 13-year-old named Toussaint Wright sneaks into an abandoned house with a stack of letters from his mother, Ava Carson, and grandmother, Dutchess. This image sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Dutchess and Ava take turns telling the story of their estranged family. Toussaint, the novel’s youngest but most perceptive narrator, tries to make sense of his own history as well as the chaos of the present.

“I’m not concerned about likability in characters. But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her”

While Mathis is no stranger to multivocal narratives (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the lives of its eponymous matriarch, her 11 children and one of her grandchildren), the voices that compose The Unsettled are markedly different from her first book as well as from each other. Deceptively brief chapters carefully detailing Ava’s and Toussaint’s trek through the streets of Philadelphia are interspersed with Dutchess’ no-nonsense dispatches from Bonaparte, Alabama, where she is fighting to save her small, all-Black town from extinction. In each character, Mathis’ dexterity of voice is on full display. This is a riveting family story, and the people who tell it do so with finesse. For Toussaint, broken windows create “glass rain [that] sparkled like tinsel.” When Ava recalls meeting Toussaint’s father, Cassius Wright, for the first time, she describes her immediate infatuation with the man who was “the same tawny gold color all over: eyes and skin and hair.” To Dutchess, Alabama highways are “flat as a white woman’s behind.” Developing the kind of intimacy necessary to create these distinct voices was no small feat. Dutchess and Toussaint came easily to Mathis. Ava, however, was much harder to pin down. Proud, impulsive and prone to depression and prophetic trances, Ava is both pitiable and, at times, infuriating, even to her creator. “She and I had a terrible relationship for years,” Mathis says, shaking her head. “She refused to have a voice that was recognizable to me. She was very resistant.”

Even her name kept changing: Mathis was only able to find something that fit after she grew to accept Ava as an individual, flaws and all. “I’m not concerned about likability in characters,” Mathis explains. “But I do want people to be able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, in order to write her more fully. I need[ed] to think of her as a full human being, not just someone I’m angry at or judging.”

Indeed, part of Mathis’ struggle to finish The Unsettled was the effort to map out the actions of the adult characters whose disastrous decisions drive much of the book’s plot. At the nadir of Dutchess’ nightclub singing career, she meets and marries Caro Carson, a native of Bonaparte, a town partially inspired by Gee’s Bend, Alabama. In the 1930s, the federal government sold tracts of land to its Black citizens as part of Roosevelt’s war on rural poverty. When Caro is killed by jealous local whites, Dutchess descends into a near-catatonic state that almost destroys both her and her daughter. Consequently, once Ava leaves Bonaparte as a young adult, many of her life choices are made to avoid returning home or becoming like her mother.

After a failed marriage, Ava reunites with Cass, who founds Ark, a commune for Black people in search of self-determined living. But soon, Ava is immobilized by his increasing radicalism and his sadistic means of controlling Ark’s inhabitants. Despite Ava’s best efforts, she and her mother are more alike than different. As Mathis points out, “Both of [them] meet men with whom they become completely and utterly enamored, sometimes to the detriment of their children. They’re [also] both drawn to these nontypical Black communities that are trying to find something like freedom, and struggling with what that is or what it might look like.” For both Ava and Dutchess, the search—and the fight—for home becomes paramount, yet a sense of home itself remains elusive. And in both cases, their children suffer for it.

Cass, a former Black Panther and disgraced physician, is also a complicated character. While his beloved Ark bears some similarities to 6221 Osage Avenue, the site of Philadelphia’s 1985 MOVE bombing, both he and his commune are more homage than historical fiction. Mathis, a Philadelphia native, describes that bombing as “an open, raw wound,” and says she is not attempting to tell its story in The Unsettled. Instead, her novel talks “about what the implications of something like that might be. What it means in terms of Black people and police interactions.”

“What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes . . . . Remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be.”

Likewise, Cass Wright is not a fictionalization of MOVE’s founder, John Africa. In fact, Mathis turned to many places for inspiration in her effort to complicate this handsome yet merciless figure. “I imagined him as this super charismatic shyster preacher who is taking everybody’s money,” she says with a smile. “But as I wrote him, I realized I wanted him to be right about some things. . . . He’s right about all of the issues around freedom. He’s right about the exploitation of Blackness. But he’s a pretty bad guy.” Cass becomes both Ava’s lover and her tormentor; her salvation, but also her obsession. Even in this way, Ava is not much different from Dutchess. As Mathis says, “She’s much more prone to fantasies and ideals whereas her mother is obsessed with this historical past. And they both in many ways sacrifice their lives to those enterprises.”

Still, Mathis warns against the danger of simply designating characters’ choices as good or bad. “A lot of this book is about the ways in which people figure out for themselves what survival looks like. And not just what surviving looks like, but what thriving looks like,” she explains. “And what that looks like for these people may not be what it looks like on a television show about the middle class.”

This is especially true for Toussaint, who realizes early that Ark might not be the paradise for which his mother has been searching. Once he discovers this, he begins making plans for their escape. “I think of Dutchess as a past, and Ava as a present,” says Mathis. “And Toussaint is the bridge between the two of them, and he’s also the future. There needed to be a future.”

Although he is still a young boy, Toussaint’s insights about the adults around him contextualize their actions even when he himself does not fully understand them. Despite Ava’s and Dutchess’ many failures, Toussaint’s love for them is persistent, and his desire to mend the rift between generations keeps the reader rooting for the survival of the entire family, even in their darkest moments.

Near the end of our interview, when I asked Mathis what she wanted readers to know, she offered words that could have been spoken by Toussaint himself: “What I hope is that people enter the book in a spirit of generosity so they can spend some time with these people, even though they might hate them sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “But still remember that they are people and remember how infuriating the people we love can be. The people we love hurt us more than anyone else. And we are more privy to their failures than to anyone else’s.”

The Unsettled, with its chorus of intergenerational voices and its themes of love, loss and legacy, contains many of the things Mathis’ loyal readers most enjoy. But there are also new characters to love and hate (or love to hate), and a story that is heartbreaking yet hopeful in ways that continue to surprise and sustain throughout. More than a decade in the making, it was definitely worth the wait.

Read our starred review of The Unsettled.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.