It is incredibly hard, incredibly wounding to stay open emotionally. I don't want to give too much away but Callie can imagine a future in the way that the rest of the family maybe can't. It's not clear what-I still don't know what. I liked forcing readers to take her emotions and observations seriously. I liked writing in Charlotte's voice, the voice of a teenaged girl-such a disparaged figure, especially in literary fiction. Charlotte is the dominant voice, but Callie is, arguably, the daughter that survives. I actually think the book is about Callie, the 9-year-old sister. Why her as opposed to Callie or their mother Laurel for example? The book gives the story to Charlotte, the eldest. You go do something else, or you do something that at the time doesn't make sense but you realize is really just your body trying to force the questions your conscious mind could not. I was just at a book club yesterday and someone said something like, "So many problems would be solved in this book if a family member just asked more questions." They seemed surprised that this did not happen, but I think that's probably more common in families than not-you don't really want to know more about your family members, sometimes, because it is too painful or it brings up your own stuff. 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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