Tayari Jones on ‘An American Marriage’
Tayari Jones is a bard of the modern South. Her novel “An American Marriage,” selected by Oprah Winfrey as her latest book-club pick, centers on a love triangle. Roy and Celestial, a middle-class black couple, are still newlyweds when Roy is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Celestial tries to support him while pursuing her career—and also finding solace with her childhood friend, Andre. We asked Jones about her book. Roy puts a human face on systemic racism. What was it like to write that character?
Because I’m a woman and he’s a man, often people think that’s where the challenge was. But I feel that as a black woman, all my life I have always been aware of the contours of their dilemma and pain and struggle. As a black man, you can be successful, do everything you can, but out of nowhere, prison or the police can get you like a natural disaster, like a hurricane. I’ve always been aware of that sense of dread and fear. So to inhabit that voice, to inhabit that fear, it wasn’t foreign territory. That is such an ingrained part of the culture — the peril to which black men are subjected.
My challenge was how to make that story new. The matter of wrongful incarceration — it’s wrong. The end. So I had to think of ways to make the story complex, to have moral ambiguity.
Tayari Jones at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, interviewed by Critic at Large Rebecca Carroll at 2 p.m. April 22 in Taper Hall .