I wanted to write about a family that fundamentally can't communicate with each other. Whats your approach to writing families in fiction? Under a clumsier author, the story of a black New England family moving to the Berkshires to teach sign language to a chimp might read like a setup to a hateful joke, but in Greenidge's hand, she reveals a profound understanding that the things that damn us may also save us.Įach family member feels so distinct and yet completely a part of each other. From the start, her writing has been easy to fall in love with: simple, elegant, and possessing an immense tensile strength. We've spent many hours, cackling together in the corners of dark bars. Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel, "We Love You, Charlie Freeman" captures that same fullness of family - its blemishes, its cracks, the tiny betrayals and the ties that bind.įull disclosure: Kaitlyn and I have been friends since graduate school. I think about the million micro-pressures exerted day after day by siblings and aunts and uncles, a vast network of love and guilt and expectation-all of it printing into the amalgam in front of me. Whenever I meet someone for the first time, I sometimes imagine what their parents must be like: the features of their face, the force of their personality.
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