.AuthorKaiHarris: 'I really love Black girlhood stories and seeing Black girls doing their thing. I wanted to really immerse the reader in nothing but that experience.'
When Kai Harris was writing“I have always enjoyed reading about Black girlhood,” she tells me over Zoom. “When I was doing my Ph.D., I was reading. I read Annie John. I read Jamaica Kincaid. I really love Black girlhood stories and seeing Black girls doing their thing. I wanted to really immerse the reader in nothing but that experience.”
“I would say one of the biggest things I learned was that it's OK for me to write a book that's not about anything else besides Black girlhood,” she shares. “It was really big for me to realize that that's all the book has to be about, both as a writer and as a Black girl, and it was affirming to then sign to Tiny Reparations, being with this imprint that is prioritizing voices like mine being authentic in the ways that I wanted to be.
KH: “I don't even know that I necessarily had it planned. I think the story chose me more than I chose the story. I would say that the setting is pretty autobiographical in that I grew up in Detroit and I would spend time in Lansing in the summer. I think I really wanted to recreate the magic of some of those summers that I spent in Lansing with my grandfather, and the rest from there is fictional.
I was just going to ask you if there were any parts of the book that were difficult to write and how you got through them, because I imagine that telling such a story during the pandemic was particularly hard. Which were especially difficult to write through?
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