Orphans of the Living tells the story of a family’s complicated history spanning from 1920s Mississippi through decades of poverty and social change. What inspired you to write this novel?

The novel is based on my mother’s own family, of which I knew little. But things in the past have a habit of invading us today, and the more I researched, the more I realized my mother’s lived experiences influenced my life, and my children’s lives, in ways I had not understood. Yes, this is a novel, but the skeleton, the bones of the story, are real. It is a hell of a story, and I wanted to dig deeper into it.

Can you share with us a little about the research that went into putting this book together?

I really had three sources. Here’s how they came into play, for instance, in my grandfather’s sojourn in Mexico. I had the bits and pieces my mother gave to me in her life, between bouts of addiction and mental illness, such as “My father went to Mexico to grow bananas.” I explored the vast trove of information and connection at Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, such as records of my grandfather’s trip to San Francisco, where he took a steamer to Mexico, and a manifest for a ship that brought him and his bananas to Galveston. And the third piece was how I followed what I learned from Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com. For example, I spent a lot of time learning how bananas were grown and raised in the tropics, and how United Fruit, then one of the largest corporations in the world — owned by men from the American South — employed Jim Crow tactics to control their labor force in Central and South America. Weaving all these sources together was an act of imagination and conjecture, and that’s why it’s a novel, not non-fiction.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

So much about this era, and these people felt so current to me: the multi-generational impact of poverty, racism, inequality, sexism; the experiences of people who were at the margins, lacking education, perhaps confused about their gender or sexual orientation, long before there was any general knowledge of these issues; the impact of Western expansion and “manifest destiny” on how average Americans in the west thought about land and success; the importance of parental love and support.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I have completed a memoir that is in many ways a sequel to Orphans of the Living. She Writes Press will publish it in spring 2027. And I’m way deep into writing a third book, another novel, a near-future political thriller.

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