Novelist Tayari Jones will read from her third book, "Silver Sparrow," at a joint VCU Libraries and James
River Writers event Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. in the VCU Student Commons. It is free and open to the public and new
members of the VCU Friends of the Library will receive seating in a
reserved section. More "Silver Sparrow" is set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s. The novel revolves around James Witherspoon's families--the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the back stories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other's lives. 
Question: The entire story seems constructed around secrets--secret sisters, secret love, beauty secrets, family secrets, secret stashes, secret promises, mother-daughter secrets--and how, so often, we put our secrets on display despite our best efforts to conceal them.
Answer: The thing about secrets is that we all have many, many secrets and by "secrets," I mean things that we keep private. And, yes, our secrets are often revealed but sometimes we end up taking our secrets to our graves. I am a little on the fence on the subject. Deception, of course, is terrible, but aren't we all entitled to private thoughts and feelings?
Still, I'm astonished at the complexity of the story in relation to every character's secrets, and how you revealed them over the course of the story. Can you tell about how you layered all of these secrets? Was it sort of organic - occurring as you moved deeper into the story? I'm imagining that some secrets surprised even you, the author.
There was one secret in the book that surprised even me. When I wrote the chapter in which the secret was revealed, I thought ... Well, look what we have here. That explains a lot! I am a writer who does not outline. As a writer, I like to have the same breathless feeling as a reader, eager to see what will happen next. It's what keeps me going. For me, writing the first couple drafts is very organic, but in the revising, I get more deliberate. I write the third draft with the awareness of knowing all the secrets already, so I can give hints and such.
Early in the book, Dana's father, James, tells her, that she is "the one that's a secret." Dana's mother, Gwen, tries to reset the encounter by taking Dana to spy on James Witherspoon's other family, who have no idea about Gwen and Dana. Gwen then tells Dana, "You are an unknown. That little girl there doesn't even know she has a sister. You know everything." Gwen draws a distinction between secret and unknown. What is Gwen's goal in taking Dana to watch the other family?
I think Gwen wants to make sure that her own daughter doesn't start to think of James's "legitimate" daughter as some larger-than-life figure. She needs Dana to see that Chaurisse is not better than she is, just more privileged. This is the real gift that Gwen gives her daughter. She wants her to see that it's just society that says she's a dirty secret.
"Silver Sparrow" is so rich in setting. Its cultural, historical and social details keep readers engaged. For example, Gwen Yarboro and James Witherspoon meet on the day of Dr. King's funeral. Mary Woodson, of the 1974 hot-grits assault on Al Green, comes into Laverne's beauty shop to get her hair done. For me, your characters' interactions with events of the times really enriched the setting of the book. How did you make those selections?
For me, history intersects with our real lives all the time. It's not a writerly device for me. My first novel, "Leaving Atlanta," is about my experiences growing up in Atlanta during the city's child murders in which 30 children were killed. This is history, but for me it's also as simple as memory. If James and Gwen met in Atlanta in 1968, leaving out the death of Dr. King would be a willful omission. I teach in an MFA program and I am always urging my students to set a story in a specific year and figure out how the moment in history affects the story. People think this is only important when you write about the distant past, but it is true for every story. I love looking in the almanac for the year the story is set to make sure I didn't leave out anything good.
Why did it work best to tell this story in the 1980s?
I decided to set the story in the 1980s because I was a teenager in those years. Part of my work as a writer is to leave a fictional history of a world I know to be real.
There are many interesting references in "Silver Sparrow"--to a Judy Blume book, to Richmond, Va., to Opelika, Ala., Debarge, Smokey Robinson, and so many more. I love that an author from Atlanta would refer to Richmond as a metropolis. Often, these little details are revealed with such affection that they feel to me like tributes. Are some of these references important to you even beyond their usefulness as markers of time or place?
I always love Opelika because my uncle married not one, but two women from that town. I always imagined it as the place where lovely women are born and raised. When I mention details in a story it's because they feel true to me. I don't plan them out or check them off on a list. If they are tributes it's because these places matter to me as a person, not just as a writer.
You split the book into halves, giving each sister half the book to tell her story so that the reader may have the complete story of this family. It would have been so much easier to tell only one side of the story. I think by structuring it this way, you gave all parties a legitimate claim. Did you experiment with other structures?
I have received mail from readers who are confused as to who they are "supposed" to like. To me, this is the biggest compliment. I really wanted to tell a whole story. A point- of-view switch is the most radical thing you can do in a story and I believe you should only do it if it is entirely necessary. In this story it was. There is a 50-foot wall between Dana's life and Chaurisse's. The only way to see the entire world is to get a look from each side of the wall. It just had to happen.
Jones was interviewed for VCU Libraries by Gigi Amateau, a Richmond-based writer and a member of the board of directors of James River Writers. She met Jones in 2008 at the Key West Literary Seminar, where they both spoke. The theme for the session was New Voices and Amateau recalls thinking then that Jones might be considered a new voice then but soon her work will be widely known. The complete interview is housed on the James River Writers Web page.
Question: The entire story seems constructed around secrets--secret sisters, secret love, beauty secrets, family secrets, secret stashes, secret promises, mother-daughter secrets--and how, so often, we put our secrets on display despite our best efforts to conceal them.
Answer: The thing about secrets is that we all have many, many secrets and by "secrets," I mean things that we keep private. And, yes, our secrets are often revealed but sometimes we end up taking our secrets to our graves. I am a little on the fence on the subject. Deception, of course, is terrible, but aren't we all entitled to private thoughts and feelings?
Still, I'm astonished at the complexity of the story in relation to every character's secrets, and how you revealed them over the course of the story. Can you tell about how you layered all of these secrets? Was it sort of organic - occurring as you moved deeper into the story? I'm imagining that some secrets surprised even you, the author.
There was one secret in the book that surprised even me. When I wrote the chapter in which the secret was revealed, I thought ... Well, look what we have here. That explains a lot! I am a writer who does not outline. As a writer, I like to have the same breathless feeling as a reader, eager to see what will happen next. It's what keeps me going. For me, writing the first couple drafts is very organic, but in the revising, I get more deliberate. I write the third draft with the awareness of knowing all the secrets already, so I can give hints and such.
Early in the book, Dana's father, James, tells her, that she is "the one that's a secret." Dana's mother, Gwen, tries to reset the encounter by taking Dana to spy on James Witherspoon's other family, who have no idea about Gwen and Dana. Gwen then tells Dana, "You are an unknown. That little girl there doesn't even know she has a sister. You know everything." Gwen draws a distinction between secret and unknown. What is Gwen's goal in taking Dana to watch the other family?
I think Gwen wants to make sure that her own daughter doesn't start to think of James's "legitimate" daughter as some larger-than-life figure. She needs Dana to see that Chaurisse is not better than she is, just more privileged. This is the real gift that Gwen gives her daughter. She wants her to see that it's just society that says she's a dirty secret.
"Silver Sparrow" is so rich in setting. Its cultural, historical and social details keep readers engaged. For example, Gwen Yarboro and James Witherspoon meet on the day of Dr. King's funeral. Mary Woodson, of the 1974 hot-grits assault on Al Green, comes into Laverne's beauty shop to get her hair done. For me, your characters' interactions with events of the times really enriched the setting of the book. How did you make those selections?
For me, history intersects with our real lives all the time. It's not a writerly device for me. My first novel, "Leaving Atlanta," is about my experiences growing up in Atlanta during the city's child murders in which 30 children were killed. This is history, but for me it's also as simple as memory. If James and Gwen met in Atlanta in 1968, leaving out the death of Dr. King would be a willful omission. I teach in an MFA program and I am always urging my students to set a story in a specific year and figure out how the moment in history affects the story. People think this is only important when you write about the distant past, but it is true for every story. I love looking in the almanac for the year the story is set to make sure I didn't leave out anything good.
Why did it work best to tell this story in the 1980s?
I decided to set the story in the 1980s because I was a teenager in those years. Part of my work as a writer is to leave a fictional history of a world I know to be real.
There are many interesting references in "Silver Sparrow"--to a Judy Blume book, to Richmond, Va., to Opelika, Ala., Debarge, Smokey Robinson, and so many more. I love that an author from Atlanta would refer to Richmond as a metropolis. Often, these little details are revealed with such affection that they feel to me like tributes. Are some of these references important to you even beyond their usefulness as markers of time or place?
I always love Opelika because my uncle married not one, but two women from that town. I always imagined it as the place where lovely women are born and raised. When I mention details in a story it's because they feel true to me. I don't plan them out or check them off on a list. If they are tributes it's because these places matter to me as a person, not just as a writer.
You split the book into halves, giving each sister half the book to tell her story so that the reader may have the complete story of this family. It would have been so much easier to tell only one side of the story. I think by structuring it this way, you gave all parties a legitimate claim. Did you experiment with other structures?
I have received mail from readers who are confused as to who they are "supposed" to like. To me, this is the biggest compliment. I really wanted to tell a whole story. A point- of-view switch is the most radical thing you can do in a story and I believe you should only do it if it is entirely necessary. In this story it was. There is a 50-foot wall between Dana's life and Chaurisse's. The only way to see the entire world is to get a look from each side of the wall. It just had to happen.
Jones was interviewed for VCU Libraries by Gigi Amateau, a Richmond-based writer and a member of the board of directors of James River Writers. She met Jones in 2008 at the Key West Literary Seminar, where they both spoke. The theme for the session was New Voices and Amateau recalls thinking then that Jones might be considered a new voice then but soon her work will be widely known. The complete interview is housed on the James River Writers Web page.