6 min readMy first introduction to Edwidge Danticat was her photograph on the cover of her short-story collection Krik? Krak! The first edition featured her portrait, her face serious and uncertain, staring straight at the camera but with an expression that suggested she did not quite want to be there. I was 16 in 1997, when that cover was published, and Danticat looked like she could have been one of my classmates, though she was older than me. The writing inside that book was fearless: stories about mothers and daughters and longing that were completely emotionally honest. It is easy, if you are a literary-minded teen, to fall in with the showiest of existentialists. The same year I read that collection, I carried around Anaïs Nin’s diaries, hoping they might convey something, anything, to someone who might catch me with them. But Danticat’s writing was not about the theatricality of despair but simply about life. I am forever grateful that I also had Danticat to read, to understand the power of plainly writing the truth. Danticat, who has written wonderful books on the craft of writing as well as four novels, is publishing a fifth this fall, Dèy.
How did this latest novel come to you? What image or sound or character made you wish to write it?
In December 2017, I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping in a mall in Miami. I was about to leave when I heard some pops over a loudspeaker. People around me started running, screaming, crying. We thought we were in a mass shooting. It turned out to be a hoax. Later, I heard it was some kids messing around with the mall’s sound system. Something similar happened at other malls around the same time.
Before I knew it wasn’t real, I ran with the crowd and hid behind a bush, where I pondered my whole life. I didn’t make any calls because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. And because these things had become so common, I thought about how this shooting might be referred to in the press. Would it be called the Christmas Massacre? Even after I found out this wasn’t real, some tension lingered in my body. Then I felt silly because there are so many people, including people in my own family in Haiti, who’ve been displaced by armed groups, who have been through the real thing. I couldn’t let go of the experience, in part because it’s linked to the much larger issue of massacres and gun violence in the U.S. and Haiti. So the next step seemed to be fiction. If there’s an image or sound or character that inspired Dèy, it’s the sound of gunshots, the image of those people fleeing and hiding in the mall that day, among whom emerged Magnolia Elie, the seemingly successful but very conflicted narrator of the book.
You wrote one of my favorite craft books ever, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, a book where you look at death in literature. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to write a craft book about this?
In 2007, I published a memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, about my uncle dying in immigration custody in 2004 and my father dying of pulmonary fibrosis soon after. I really had two fathers. My uncle helped raise me in Haiti. When I was writing the book, my mother explicitly told me to leave her out of it. It’s their book, she said. So after she died of ovarian cancer in 2014, I decided to write about her.
How do you write about someone who doesn’t want to be written about? How do you write about death at all? I started rereading some of the books I love with that question in mind.
Writing the book was a way to both process my grief and think about how to start writing again after my mother’s death. In terms of my approach to writing about death and dying, my goal, be it in fiction and nonfiction, is always to help the reader get to know the dying person as much as possible so that we can grieve, or at least understand, that person together on the page. This might involve highlighting singular things about them that will make the reader miss them as much as I do when they’re gone.
Why do you think so many novelists are drawn to ghost stories?
A ghost might offer a certain parallel layer to a story, a dimension of another world, or a lineage for a story. I’m personally drawn to the kind of ghost stories where the ghosts don’t realize they’re ghosts or when they think the humans are the ghosts.
In Dèy, there’s a scene where the mother thinks she sees her friend, who’s very much alive but in another country, running away from her in the city where she lives, and she marvels at the fact that we can also be haunted by the living, based on how much we miss or are longing for them.
I mostly write the things that haunt me, so haunting is often the genesis of a story for me as well.
I’m always so interested in this question of researching a place, even a place that you feel that you know or a place that you came from. Do you research things that feel everyday to you about, say, Miami or New York?
I’m a rigorous researcher. That comes partly from spending so much time writing nonfiction, especially for publications where every line is fact-checked. So I’m used to researching as I write. Research helps me build a world that feels convincing, that sustains the reader’s suspension of disbelief.
I’m reminded of something Gabriel García Márquez, who was initially a journalist, once said about the difference between journalism and fiction. In journalism, he said, a single false fact can undermine the entire piece, while in fiction, one true detail can give the whole story legitimacy.
In your nonfiction, you have written about your family. For many writers, the question of how to write fairly and accurately about loved ones is a complicated one. How do you approach it?
I always say I’d rather have family than a book, so when I write about loved ones, I usually let them see it. If there’s something they object to or don’t want included, I consider changing it. Sometimes I negotiate and ask whether I can change their names.
I know that for some writers, this kind of approach isn’t possible, especially for people who have been hurt and want—need—to write about that hurt and the people who’ve hurt them. Ultimately, you have to write what you can live with and decide whether the aftermath, whatever it is, is worth it. But whether you choose to publish it or not, I’d say write your most raw and honest truth. If you don’t, that unwritten truth might become a kind of mountain that blocks you from writing other things you need to write.
What does your writing routine look like?
I don’t really have a writing routine. I just write whenever I can. When I was in my 20s and living alone, I was a binge writer. If I was obsessed with a project, I’d work around the clock, barely go anywhere, and sleep when I was tired but work the rest of the time until it was done.
When my daughters were born—they’re now 21 and 17—I wrote when they were sleeping, and when they were in school, I wrote around drop-off and pick-up times and then a bit after they went to bed.
I would tell beginning writers, don’t try to match anyone else’s routine; write around the life you have. That’s what I’ve always tried to do.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
