It took a near altercation with a stranger at Heathrow Airport to finally convince Tayari Jones she was a world-renowned author. No matter that Oprah Winfrey had already picked Jones’s fourth novel, An American Marriage, for her career-making Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 or that Barack Obama had named it one of his picks of the year, it was only when Jones tried to steal a businessman’s copy as they went to board a plane that it hit home. “I was gathering my things, saw a copy of An American Marriage and thought, ‘How did it get all the way over there?’” Jones recalls, smiling. “I went over and the person reading said, ‘That’s my book!’ It blew my mind. That was the moment when I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, my book is an international bestseller.’”
Thanks to her unforgettable tale of a wrongfully imprisoned man, and the impact his incarceration has on his marriage, life has changed immeasurably over the past couple of years for the 49-year-old author from Atlanta, Georgia. For a long time she was a writer cut adrift, her first two books out of print by the time An American Marriage was published in 2018. Now, with the film rights sold to Winfrey, the Women’s Prize for Fiction under her belt, and endorsements from the great and good, she’s just about managed to squeeze in an interview with Vogue around several sold-out appearances in the UK.
Jones, luminous in spite of an exhausting schedule, is nursing a strong coffee as she sits across the table from me in a photo studio in London’s Hackney to talk about the publication of her next novel, Silver Sparrow. Strictly speaking, this is not a new work (it was written in 2011), but until now it has only been published in America. “The greatest gift you can give your earlier books is a new book,” Jones says sagely in her soft, Southern tones as afternoon turns to evening. “Because of An American Marriage it has a new life. In my view, a book is not like a carton of milk. It doesn’t expire.”
If Jones sometimes sounds like a woman with all the answers, I suspect that is because she often is. She has her hands loosely clasped together, warm yet businesslike, as she delivers her thoughts – on everything from abortion laws to the prison system to that icon of young-adult literature Judy Blume (more of whom later) – in fluid, fully formed sentences. Hers is a wisdom that bears the hallmarks of a teacher (she has been a professor of English and creative writing for many years, and in 2018 joined the faculty of Emory University in Atlanta), but one that also comes from experiencing years of perceived failure as an author.
“When I wrote my first book, I remember I went to this writers’ conference,” Jones says. “These young hotshot writers were talking about what they had worn to their luncheon to meet the media. I did not know other people were having luncheons to meet the media, let alone what they had worn. I had an interview in the local paper, and I was so proud of it I cut it out.
“I just thought, ‘I’m so far behind,’” she continues. “I went to my little room and sat on the small single bed, and I just cried. In a weird way, that moment was the greatest gift to me as a writer. Because I believed I would never catch up, I stopped trying to, and just started to write the books that mattered to me. I think that has served me well through my career. But let me tell you, when I was that young debut, crying there, I felt such despair.”
By the time she started writing Silver Sparrow, both her debut (Leaving Atlanta, 2002) and its follow-up (The Untelling, 2005) had fallen out of print. The arrival of a new program, Nielsen BookScan, meant publishers could see sales figures in an instant and it made many quiet authors, such as Jones, unattractive prospects. Still, as a teacher, she told her students to write for themselves, not the market, and so she finished the novel (not being able to “face those kids” if she didn’t). She printed one copy for herself, which she put in a drawer, and sent one to her sister. And that, she thought, was that.
Then, in an echo of her early career, Jones once again found herself at a writers’ conference, “embarrassed because my career was in shambles. Everyone else there was so famous. I was just humiliated. But I read my little thing and a woman said, ‘I think I could help you.’ I didn’t know who she was.” Placing Jones hand-in-hand with a publisher, the woman smiled and left them to talk. The publisher asked: “‘How do you know Judy?’ I said, ‘I don’t know anyone named Judy.’ She said, ‘I mean Judy Blume, who just introduced us.’ And I looked to tell Judy thank you and she had vanished. Like a real-life fairy godmother. It really happened. True story.”
Thanks to Blume – an author Jones has loved forever – Silver Sparrow found its way on to bookshelves. Set in Atlanta in the 1970s (although it also rewinds to the early 20th century and ends in the year 2000), it follows two families joined together by one man, who is husband and parent in both. It is a poignant tale of secrets and betrayal, told through the eyes of half-sisters Dana and Chaurisse, with only Dana knowing the full extent of their father’s double life.
On the surface, Silver Sparrow is centred around a relatively rare situation – a man with a secret second family – but the book raises pertinent questions about modern family life. “A lot of us have unconventional families,” says Jones. “I met someone just yesterday who had read Silver Sparrow and said, ‘My father remarried, and I got demoted from a daughter to a niece.’ This is not uncommon at all. And it’s something that I don’t think we’ve discussed fully – how that feels.”
Jones herself is a child of a second marriage, although “there is no scandal there,” she clarifies. “My father is not a bigamist. But I also say to people, ‘My father is not a bigamist that I know of. Just as your father is not a bigamist that you know of.’ That’s part of the mystery of fatherhood.” She has two sisters, but they lived “600 miles away”, while Jones grew up with their father. “I’ve always wondered what their lives were like; what they thought of me; what they thought of the family that I grew up in,” Jones says. “I wrote Silver Sparrow as a gift to my sisters.”
Born in Cascade Heights, Atlanta, in 1970, she describes herself as a “child of two PhDs”. Her mother and father met in graduate school and “were very much involved in civil rights. I was a child born at the dawn of a new world in that way.” Even so, her father, now 80 (“he texts me every day – he has a Bitmoji, it’s so cute”), was “frankly bewildered” when Jones said she wanted to study creative writing. “He felt it was frivolous. He would say, ‘I don’t understand where I got this bourgeois child.’ My father has a PhD now, but he picked cotton as a boy. And he would say: ‘When you pick cotton, you don’t stand out there in the cotton field and say, “This cotton doesn’t recognise my complexity, I fear this is not my niche.” You just pick the damn cotton!’”
Jones has always been interested in “chronicling the black middle-class experience” she was a part of in Atlanta. It’s one of the reasons that, after 10 years in New York, she recently returned to her hometown to live and write. “Every time I was interviewed, it was by someone who lived within walking distance of my place in Brooklyn,” she says. “What does this mean for the future of American literature, if, even though we come from different places, we’re all neighbours? I feel like I’m almost an ancient cartographer making a map of a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Where I live now, one of the Real Housewives used to live down the block,” she says, smiling. “She’s moved, thank God.”
Like An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow grapples with the cultural and societal expectations of several generations of women, particularly when it comes to marriage and children. If in An American Marriage Celestial, wife to imprisoned Roy, is criticised for not standing by her husband, in Silver Sparrow it is difficult to comprehend why the “second” wife stays.
“It’s very rare that you see novels by black women depicting people leaving marriages for reasons other than the most extreme,” says Jones. “Black people during slavery were forbidden to marry, so every marriage feels like a bit of a triumph. And to squander that – it’s just more at stake. And there’s this persistent narrative that black fathers are in short supply – not to be traded away lightly. These kind of pressures explain why these two women are willing to be with the same man. I didn’t want him to be this sweet-talking lover boy, so it would be as though they were hypnotised by lust or romance. No – he’s offered both of them what they hope is a stable life for themselves and a future for their children.”
The biggest change Jones has seen “between the mothers in Silver Sparrow and today, is the advent of safe, reliable, affordable birth control. My grandmother gave birth to 12 children, 10 survived. Very, very late in her life she told me that she had only wanted two children, a boy and a girl. But you can’t really talk to your daughters about that, because then it makes them feel unloved.”
Marriage and children haven’t figured in Jones’s life. “I think I’m the first generation where this is not a startling fact,” she says. “But we’re a generation without role models: we’re making our way as we go. I bought a house, I’m almost 50 now, and a number of people were really concerned. They felt like, ‘You should have a temporary home, because you’ll marry and your real life will start.’ I’m of the first generation where there are a number of women living their real lives outside of marriage, outside of motherhood.”
Now, Jones is busy with the not undaunting task of writing her fifth novel – one that, for the first time in her career, will be highly anticipated. In line with her desire to chart the changing face of her city, this book, she says, will follow a woman who moves back to the neighbourhood where she grew up, and watches as it undergoes gentrification. It sounds like her most autobiographical yet. “I want to be a Southern writer writing about the South from the South,” Jones smiles. “So I’m back. I’m so happy. I am so happy, you just don’t know. I am the happiest I’ve been in my adult life.”
Silver Sparrow is available now via OneWorld.
This article was originally published in the April 2020 issue of British Vogue.
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