Insights from Charmaine Wilkerson's Interview

I just write in short bursts until I realized that I was creating a whole universe that required a novel. And that's what happened with Black Cape. Welcome to our latest Book Reporter Talks to Interview, where our guest today is Charmaine Wilkerson. We are going to be talking about her debut novel, Black Cake, which is a, hold on for this folks, a book of the month selection, a read with Jenna Today Show, book of the month club pick, and a book reporter bets on selection. It's also a book that I will tell people, I'll just hold it up and say, just read this. And I'm not going to give them anything else. I'm going to say, just read this. So that's the kind of book this is. And on that note, welcome Charmaine. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So looking forward to this, let's start by you telling us about Black Cake. Just give us a little background. Well, you know, it's a multi-generational story. So it takes, it goes back and forth between the past and the present. And in the present day, it's a pretty straightforward thing, or so it seems. You have a brother and sister, Byron and Benny, who were once inseparable, born and raised in California. They have fought, they've sort of grown apart, big rift in their family. And they're forced to come together to deal with their mother's death. It's the first time they're seeing each other in years. And they also are about to discover that their mother has this hidden past. And part of it is connected to this strange inheritance. She's left them this small black cake, a Caribbean fruitcake, sitting in her freezer. And why the cake? So she's left this whole... voice recording on a USB 10 drive that goes on for hours and hours in which he talks about all of these different people. And it's all going to come together. It's going to change the way in which Byron and Medin see their mother, their family, and also themselves. And it's also going to require them to take action. It's going to require them to do something with their lives, live their lives a little differently. So that's kind of the overall plot. then there are just all of these side stories and and it just gets into other people's lives in part through the stories of their mother Eleanor and it really sort of starts to tease out the idea of you know who you think you are your own identity and how other people see you and how that affects your life and the power of stories you to shape all of that. The story has power to shape who you are and how you see yourself, not only when it's told, but when it's not told. Things that are left out there that then come to light. You know, so many stories of family have bound sisters and a family of women. And I felt that the brother-sister relationship here really added something. It contributed to the dynamic because, you know, men often think differently from women. And so the way they're both going to approach this, I think, made it a very different story. Did they come to you as a brother and sister from the start? Because it just added something so huge. Yes, they did. But I should say something about the way in which I write. I did not sit down, first of all, to write a story about cake. And I did not sit down to write a story about a brother and sister. I just went with the scene. I tend to write in scenes. I tend to follow emotions, ideas. And my singular idea was these two girls, not sisters, but close friends, obsessed with the sea. And because they were strong swimmers and swam out in the sea, they were physically exceptional. They were very strong. And their attitude towards their world will change their lives, gets them into trouble and also helps them to overcome obstacles. So that's really where I began. And I didn't even know then that I was writing a novel. But the brother and sister did come together. I was writing some other stories. I thought maybe they'd be a short story or something linked. And there was always sort of Byron and Benny. Byron, about nine years older than Benny. And a sort of organic tie between them. A really strong love, but also a strong sense of disillusionment, of confusion. and not quite being able to find their way back to how they began as a very close brother and sister. And you wonder why they're apart. And you're going to understand that more as time goes on. The recording was a very clever way for them to learn what their mother had to say, because if it had been a letter, they would have read it very quickly. And they might have skipped over the salient parts, because you can do that if you're just reading quickly. And this measured storytelling allowed you to measure storytelling, the book as well, was always envisioned as a recording, because it just made so much sense, because I'm thinking, If this was just a letter, they would have read it in about five minutes, digested it. But hearing her voice and how she was expressing herself would add to whatever was happening in the story. Am I on to track? Well, yes. I mean, it was the idea of, again, the story, storytelling. It's more like a conversation. She had this need to talk to her children who were estranged from one another, who were not talking to one another. The daughter has been gone for quite some time. So she did have this need to speak. And I would say that pretty much from the beginning, I knew there was some kind of secret, but I wasn't sure where. And it just emerged that she would speak to them. Speak to them and keep telling the story. You know, the two young girls that you referred to were seemingly fearless. They're swimmers and have these characters that are, they're at the heart of the story and their bravery and their energy. First of all, did you make them swimmers because that would be something that we would see in the islands and where they were? I didn't make them swimmers. I just started writing one day. And I know you've read the story. So you'll know that I just started writing pull, pull, pull, pull is referring to the movement of the arm in the water. And I actually wrote a very short story based on that. And then it just kept going and going. I will say this. My parents grew up in the Caribbean and they were both very strong swimmers. And my mother was even a competitive swimmer. Never saw her swim in the sea, but I did see my father. And I was fascinated by the kind of person who would strike out and keep going towards the horizon in the sea. And I also ran marathons when I was younger and had friends who were triathletes. And again, I was fascinated by the people who would throw themselves into the water and just keep going. They'd get kicked in the face, they'd get kicked in the chest, and they would just go. And that was not me. I'd swim in a swimming pool. I love the sea. But I have never been the kind of person who would ever strike out towards the horizon. So I think that has always been in my head. head. And as this scene emerged, it emerged as a kind of two things, a very deep connection to the natural world, but also the idea of people who were so different, at least in my mind, so different from anything that I could really imagine, that they had to be, even as teenagers on the cusp of womanhood, mythic in their own way. That's how I imagine. Yeah, they were. It was just, this is what they were going to do. They didn't have surfboards. I think like we know surfboards, but they would just go out on the water. And if the water was rough, it didn't matter to them. They would just go over the waves and keep on going. So you knew automatically that these women, these women that you were coming to know that you didn't know who they were going to be were really, um, adventuresome. They were really adventuresome. They were brave. They were not going to be sitting on the beach being admired by boys. That was like, not what they were going to do. And Did you surf at all when you were growing up? Did you hit the water like that at all? No. There are certainly, as in fiction, we take all sorts of details from either our own lives or things we've seen or read or heard. That's how the logic of the imagination works. But I can tell you, I do not surf. I was never an open sea swimmer. Yes, I ran marathons. And I drew on that. I did draw on that sometimes when I was trying to imagine. that connection. I do understand what it's like to reach a certain point mentally in physical activity where nothing will stop you. And it's a dangerous, it's a dangerous confine to live. You know, you're right on the border. You will keep going at the risk of collapsing, even if you're not running for the Olympics. And so I sort of drew on that feeling, people who would push themselves and push themselves only these girls really were very strong you know they weren't me hobbling along in a marathon you know um and and and so that that very much was um a work of the imagination. So no, I never learned to surf, never swam in the open sea, but I've always been fascinated by that connection with the water, having loved the water myself, the person who will go out to meet the power of the sea and work with it and listen to it, because ultimately the sea is the powerful one. Yeah. And the power of a person who can swim or surf. The true power is the ability to observe, understand, and try to meet what's already happening, the power over which you have no control. Yeah. And that's exactly what they're doing is they're just out there risking at any single moment. There's a risk thing that's involved as well. I'm with you. I'm swimming in pools. I was tumbled once in the ocean and I was like enough. And I was like, I don't think, and I will say, if we go to the Caribbean, I will swim in the water if it's calm down there. which is just beautiful. But when it's the really wild surf, now I'm sitting on the beach reading the book. I'm so perfectly happy with that. At the start of each chapter, there's a name or a word. And thus we know what this chapter is about, or maybe we don't, or we know we're going to learn something new. And often it's a new character being introduced to us. And that chapter may give us pause because who is that person? Were there chapter titles at the very beginning? Because I know you are a stream of consciousness. short scene writer. And I think that we need to get that across to everyone because you'd mentioned it before. And do you handwrite those short scenes or do you type or what do you do? Well, one of the best things that ever happened to me was learning to touch type when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. And I did work in news and communication, you know, all of my professional life before really saying, I want to spend more time doing what I've always wanted to do, which is write fiction. So it's very easy for me. As I'm speaking to you now, it's just very easy for me, Carol, to just start typing. So I stream of consciousness. Let's turn it into a verb. I stream of consciousness into my laptop. But I do also write by pencil. I have to use a pencil. No pens. I have a pen here. And I do actually scribble sometimes a scene or an idea. But it's not necessarily a beginning, middle and end. It might be a few words. It might be an impression. And then it's all so many going to come together at some point in a very different way for you because you've never written a novel before. It's going to get to that. So you've lived in many places. I think you were born in New York, lived in the Caribbean and London for a while. And now Italy. Am I right? Or actually just Italy. Yeah, just Italy. I do have family in the UK, but essentially, no, I'm. Both coasts of the United States. I went to college in New York, graduate school in California, moved back and forth, and then ended up in Italy. Which is quite lovely, said my relatives, who would love to have me come there and visit. You must, you must. I'm not really a Fitzgerald, I'm a Sassetti. It's just easier to spell once I got married. Let's say that. Did it give you some idea of what it must be like for the characters in Black Cake? Because they live. in so many different places. And you really get to these places and you have to immerse yourself into that culture to a degree, but you always have what your background was as well. You bring something with you, but then you adapt to what the places are. Is that what's really going on in the book? Well, it's very much, you know, when I write, and we were saying this before, and I probably didn't even answer your question about stream of consciousness. I really do just go. And I'm not thinking too consciously about where I'm going. I'm only thinking of the feeling. And sometimes that happens with place. And I'm not sure what the answer to that question you've asked would be, except that the logic of the imagination has this way of mixing what we observe in real life, what we take from real life, with the mind. the, you know, the meandering of the mind. And so I think what you're saying, make sense, you know, you, you start, you just start following an idea, but you're drawing all along on things that you've seen or heard or lived or experienced or, you know, read. Yeah, and I think that's along the way. And let's get to the black cake. Now, when we tease this book in November to our readers, we do a monthly preview of. what's coming, what you want to have on your radar. I immediately said, I need to find a recipe for black cake. And within an hour, one of our readers had written and said, I found one. And then another reader wrote and said, I found one too, which was just like really funny to me. So have you ever made black cake? I have. It's just that it took me quite a while to get a black cake, meaning a very dark cake. And the color comes from a combination of how rich it is, meaning how much of the fruit soaked in rum you add to the mix. And also the blacking, which is basically a burning of dark brown cane sugar. So it took me a while to understand that you really needed a lot. of both. But my mother was a legendary black cake maker. She called it plum pudding, we called it rum cake. But many Caribbeans call it black cake. And she made this amazing plum pudding, rum cake, black cake. So that memory is what I strive for. And I'm happy to say that mine tastes pretty good. But for a few years there, it was woefully brown. So I really had to work to get it darker. To get it to move to the right direction. You know, it's so funny. There's a recipe in the discussion guide that the publisher put together, the U.S. publisher. And I saw that some ingredients needed to be soaked for four months. So when I wrote to our reading group guys, readers this week, I said, OK, I just want to tell you, this is not for next month's book club. This is for a couple of months out. And I did find a place to buy it online that I'm going to drop into the links below. So in case anybody's not intrepid enough. And. And we'll include the other link to the other recipe as well. But you're not going to make it. We know someplace you can buy it at this point. It may not be as good as yours. But I realize that people in book clubs are going to want to sample the cake. And when I got there and I said, so soak the ingredients for four months. And I'm like, OK, we'll be meeting on this when? Over the summer. So did you actually soak them or can you buy or pre-soak? Do you did it? I imagine you can. But, you know, like a lot of people who have this tradition in their household or their family. I had never eaten the cake that was purchased before last fall, all my life. I had never eaten a cake that hadn't been made by someone, you know, that I knew, my mother or an aunt or someone. And the people I know who make this always keep fruit soaking, they call them fruits because there are various kinds, soaking in a jar in a dark, dry place. And so that's something that comes into the story, as you know. Yes. And is even used in an amusing episode, but it's true. It's a sacred thing. It's in there, you know, it's hiding away, waiting for usually Christmas time, usually Christmas time. But then there are the emergency situations like weddings and you have to sort of ramp up your supply. So interesting. And in the book, when you do take it, it's very, it's very, very funny moment. It's like, wait a second, do we have the fruit? Do we get the fruit with us? We must go bring fruit. I just love that. You know, for years you wrote flash fiction. And can you share what this is to readers? Because I think that when they understand you're writing a flash fiction, they're going to understand how much of the book came together to be a two paragraph or few line chapter. You know, flash fiction, I should probably explain what it is. It's one of many terms, but probably the most popular, used for very, very, very short stories. So we're talking about maybe a page or two. or even a paragraph or two. And I like to write what's known as microfiction, which is a mystery to me because I'm a chatterbox. But you know, I love to write short. And even when I write longer things, I did work on another novel, which never saw the light of day. And I, again, wrote it in the same way. I just write in short bursts until I realized that I was creating a whole universe that required a novel. And that's what happened with Black Cape. So going back to the flash fiction, I had reached a point in my life where I'd always wanted to write stories. I always said that I'd be writing when I didn't really, I spent most of my energy writing for other people, which was great, you know, working in news as well. It's a great way to sort of be part of your community. But it was different. And I kept wanting to just let my mind wander. And the difference between what I did before and what I started to do with flash fiction was I always knew where I was going when I was writing news or other communication. You had some idea. With flash, I would just go with a feeling. The thing that distinguishes that kind of writing is it's not just a short story. It's a very intense kind of gaze. Again, maybe on an emotion, maybe on an object or an idea. And often one plays with structure. A number of poets become flash fiction writers. I don't consider myself a poet. I really like to write prose, but I love that... When I was starting to write in a way that seemed to come naturally to me, not being sure where that would lead me, and this was about half a dozen years ago, I discovered this whole community of people who were doing this sort of thing. And it almost gave me permission. It was like a, ah, let me just exhale. I have permission to write a story in a slightly different way. But, you know, coming to this point, I'd say, Carol, I think that really very often flash fiction is just like conversation. And so I think that the novel Black Cake, in a way, is like conversation. Meaning maybe I'll say, oh, Carol, I need to tell you this story. I went down to the store and then I saw that guy. You know that guy. So maybe I tell you a beginning, middle and end. But then it might be. Oh, I forgot. I forgot. You know, you know, the dog, you know, the dog, and maybe you talk that way. Some people write that way. We jump around. Yes, we don't always tell a story in a linear fashion. But very often when we talk, we do kind of get the story across, right? And that's, um, I think that's how most people tell stories. We just don't realize it. Yeah, they're not that concise. It's going to be, well, let's go over here for a little bit. Oh, but wait, you're right. The dog. Oh, wait. But the dog climbed on. Did you see that? Yeah, exactly. You know, one of the things that I liked about your brisk chapters, what they were concise, but continued great storytelling. I could read a few paragraphs and know the answer to a question enough to move the story forward. Like, who is this person? Why is this name of this chapter? They're really concise, really quick. I'm in. I'm out. At points where you were viewing what you had revealed and what was to be revealed. As part of the editing process at some point, because you've got, this is, this book is like peeling an onion back and we're going to get to the middle and we have all these layers. And sometimes the layers might just like not completely come off the onion. So you're not quite sure it's going to happen. And what I was thinking is along the way, the brisk chapters were still the concise storytelling, but did it all have to get put in a certain place? Like the... chapter about so-and-so that's only going to be this long should it be here or should it be here picture you shuffling on the floor with pages and you know I tend to do that more in my mind but what I would do is I wouldn't shuffle the whole page but I will pick up a pencil at a certain point and start scribbling and saying well if I put this chapter about Carol there but then she shows up here maybe I can't have that line in there because it's too soon and I need to wait. So I would do that after. I tend to write that way. I will say that it was actually more fractured and more out of chronological order, because can we say that the story in theory goes back and forth between two timelines, and in both cases, very vaguely goes forward in time. But chapters are out of chronological order sometimes, or you'll see repeats, and those are intentional. And I have to say that, you know, I think that the editing process, once I'd reached the publisher, you know, the publisher was just wonderful. And in particular, the editor for Penguin Random House, Hilary Rubin Tiemann, was just wonderful in asking stories. I mean, not asking stories, asking questions about the story and also saying, I really love this. We really love this. Maybe you want to consider putting two short sections together. Mm hmm. So that. the reader has just enough time to stay with that character or idea a little bit longer. And it was a challenging but also wonderful process because I was reassured very quickly that I was still able to write in short bits, that I could still jump around. But the cryptic nature of the writing, I'm not sure that's always a good thing, but that is very much me. I don't always name places. I don't always name people. I don't describe people. Yeah. But, you know, I read an interview that you did with Penn where you said, when writing scenes of great drama or violence, I sometimes skip what others might consider obligatory details. I've written passages that were quite spare and even cryptic, and I believe that a scene can carry sufficient information and emotional weight for the reader, even without all the particulars. And I love this line, omission has presence as well. And I found that that's what I loved about the short pages. And did you go back to edit them to be even more spare? Because you've written a number of short stories. Many of them are prize winners. So you obviously have a knack for writing short and tight. And I just saw that some of these paragraphs, you could just see how you could have trimmed them back, even from what you had written, because the words that were there were the ones that mattered. You know, and again, this takes us back to the idea of flash fiction. Without a doubt, precision and omission are beautiful tools to use in storytelling because they allow the reader to participate in a different way. Because the reader has their imagination. The reader has their understanding of what may be happening in the world. And I think it's a kind of a balancing act in which you trust the reader. you know, I'm a reader, I love books. And so if I tell a story, can I trust the reader to meet me halfway? But I would say that I tend to be, I tend to go more towards the spare and cryptic in some scenes. And so the editing was not as much of an issue there. It was more of a challenge to be sure that I didn't leave so much out. that I was going to lose the reader along the way. Yeah, they had to have enough clues to be fair along the way of what was going to happen. And, you know, Eleanor reveals so much to her children during her discussion with them, their one-sided discussion. More than thought, it was such a great way to just leave a message that no one can really interrupt and say, but mom, it's just like, here's what it's going to be. And one can tell that the character and development of character means a lot to you. And you can just see it where you're telling her story and how you're leaving us of who she is, the good and the bad, the things that she changed, the thing that she did. Do you just sketch out ideas of them as you wrote, or did they just come organically? Because she's telling this real big backstory. No, no, they came organically, without a doubt. I'm the kind of person who at a certain point when I realized I had a story growing. It was sort of an aha moment. I had the girls swimming and Benny, who's the daughter, who's the daughter of this matriarch. I had a story that I thought was a short story with Benny. And all of a sudden I was writing that other thing that I saw was growing. And all of a sudden I went, Benny, wait a second, Benny is part of this family. And that's when it started to go. And Byron was already in there. So I would say that it really was an organic process. However, throughout, I would say much later, I had to go back and take a look and do things like double check years and locations and think really carefully about whether when I do research, when I did research for this story, I called it my plausibility check. Because really, I had imagined the story and I tend to see things in a wheel, or we might call it a pie chart. So I could kind of see the whole story. I could see the story. Sometimes someone would walk into the story and I thought, oh, there's that person. Oh, well, that's interesting. And the cake was not in the story initially. The cake came into the story. But the moment the cake came in, I understood where it had come from. and how much it could come to symbolize because of some thinking that I'd done, you know, about food and identity and diaspora. So yeah, it's organic. And then I take a pencil, and I do a lot of mind mapping. That's what we call mind mapping. Someone more honest might call it doodling. Because I literally, I literally draw diagrams, little squares with names and then arrows and well, yeah, but if this person is here, does it make sense if that person's there? And if this happened, could it really happen in that year? Let me go do some research. Does this make sense? So, you know, that's the nature of my writing. It starts with impulse, with feeling. I begin to see the world taking shape. And then I reach a point at which I ask myself, and this goes back to your question, am I conveying? what I'm seeing in my head. Is that making sense? And it's also wonderful, you know, when you work with an editor who says something like, and this happened to me, gee, you know, Byron and Benny, we're just sort of wondering, you know, what about this aspect of their relationship? What about that? And I'd go back to my laptop and I'd call up what I thought was just a background file, notes. And I go, oh, I guess I can use that. I'll put that in, you know. Because it was all kind of there. I had that story in my head, but how you convey that is another issue. And, you know, there's so many times you just come up with great ideas and you just throw them all down and you're like. Are they really going to be great? And I call the staff all day long and say, is this a good idea or a bad idea? You can tell me it's a bad idea. Because there's so many people that I find that run things that just come in. I remember years ago, there was an ad for an author. And I thought it didn't convey what it should say. So I said something to one of the publishers. And they said, we're having a marketing meeting. I'll bring it up. And I said, what happened? They said, well, the publisher came in and said, isn't this the best ad we ever ran? And then no one said a word. And I said, you know what? is what I've always shaped my career around doing, is not saying I know the answer. And what you're saying is, you don't know the answer. If you say you don't know, you can really explore things a lot more, because you're not saying, it's black, and it's white. It's, let's pull in the colors, and let's see what's going on. Well, it's not for me to speak for other writers, but I think it is true of a lot of writers, and that is, and again, this comes down to the difference between the writing I do in fiction and the the kind of writing I would do before, you often don't go in. I don't go in with a preconceived notion. And you talk about having the answers versus asking the question. Often people write because they're exploring. They do see the story. So I saw the basic story. I wrote the, I don't want to throw out spoilers, but as you know, there is a murder in the story. I wrote the scene in which the reader, but not Byron and Benny, comes to understand what sort of happened. You know, they come to a better understanding of what happened. I wrote that fairly early on. I mean, I had that. So there were just a lot of things that I knew in terms of positioning in the story, but I was always exploring who were these people? How could Benny be so vulnerable? in her life and seem so needy and sort of little girlish, and yet actually be so completely secure in who she was? How could she struggle so much, and yet never have a doubt about who she was? And that has to do with, again, I was exploring really issues of what is identity? You know, you have shifting concepts of identity and family. And we often talk about knowing who you are. Well, who are you really? You are who you believe yourself to be, how you identify, but you're also who you have to be in the world. How do you navigate the world? How do you deal with running up against other people's expectations and stereotypes? How do you separate your identity with the people you love? How do you separate your identity from the people you love? How do you separate your identity from the people you resent, you don't like, you blame, you fear? So those are some of the other issues that were in there in the novel Black Cake that helped to create these characters. But for me, it was an exploration. I was getting to know them. You know, it's like I meet you one day, we talk, and then I meet you in a month and we talk about other things. Yeah. And the role of women changes throughout the book. reflecting the changing of the times. So did this require, once again, you're looking at your research going, wait, did that really happen in that timeframe? Is that really what women would be doing? Or were you relating family experiences that you knew of? Because we can learn a lot from family without even looking things up and say, remember aunt so-and-so when she told that story? Well, how old was she? And when did that happen? So it was looking up or relating, a little bit of each? A little bit of each without a doubt, because- Without a doubt, there were ideas that came to me that were settled into my head from having grown up in a family where a number of people lived in the Caribbean. A few people migrated twice, like the parents in the story Black Cake, twice meaning from the Caribbean to the UK. which if you go from an English speaking island made a lot of sense, and then to the United States. And certainly stories, funny stories, but essentially, I went with the imagination first, the idea, and sometimes then had to look it up. For example, in the UK, there are these two nursing students. And one of the questions I had was, would they really be living in an apartment or a boarding house? in such a way that they would also have friendships with a couple of other girls? Was it plausible they'd have access to the kitchen? In those times, we're talking about the end of the 1960s in London. So that's where I would do the research. Whereas the relationship sort of came organically. You know, there's this great line where Eleanor talks about her life as being one long swim. I love that. Breathe deep and wide. Take it one stroke at a time. I feel like I need that framed on my wall. I want to have that up with your name underneath it as breathe deep and wide and take it one stroke at a time. Because so many times we're just trying to see the other side where we have to get to. And you're not really like it's this is what happens along the way. Does that also reflect how you view life? If it's like, just keep it going one stroke at a time? Well, you know, people who know me would say, no, you're always thinking about what about the future? And then what if this happens and I need to be plan and I need to prepare? So there's that side of me. But without a doubt. One has to somehow find a way to also just be in the moment. And I think that we need that one to concentrate and to be productive, but also just to hold on to our, our health, you know, our mental health. And sometimes you just need to slow it down one thing at a time. And I think that's two years. You had to slow it down. You didn't have a choice. You had to slow it down. You had to think about what mattered, what didn't matter, what you had to do. It was something that became nothing at all. Like, it's just like, it's not important anymore because it doesn't really matter. So I feel like, yeah, it's, it really, you sit there and say, breathe deep and wide, take it one stroke at a time. She had that up on March 20th, 2020. But, you know, it could also be seen as a metaphor, for example, for the whole act of writing. When you write a story, often people will say, oh, I should write a novel or I really want to write a memoir. And, you know, I really don't have that much experience, Carol. It's my debut novel. I kept saying I wanted to write, but I've really only spent this much time writing in the past several years. But I will say this, you know, Annie Lamott also said this in her book on writing bird by bird. You know, you have to think of just just keep going. You cannot always think I'm writing a book. You don't do that with a marathon. You say you're writing, you say you're running a marathon, but you don't go out and run a marathon. You go out every day. I remember going out saying, I'm going to run eight miles today. And it was so hot. It was in Connecticut. It was really humid summer. And I was so determined that I just thought, no, I'll just stop at three miles today. It's okay. It's not over. I haven't lost the race yet. You know, there's time. So I think that's a metaphor for writing and for doing a lot of things that we do in life. We can't, we can't. frighten ourselves by looking too much at the big picture. It is useful to look at the big picture in life, but in some things, you know, just go one stroke at a time. Just slow it down. Let's see what happens. You know, there's so many lines in this book that I love that I'm going to give you another, and this is actually more than one line. When you lived a life under any name, that life became entwined with others. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you. And you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that. Because people you loved were part of your identity too. Perhaps the biggest part. You know, I rarely use that line that so many people say, well, those are gorgeous sentences. But those are gorgeous sentences. And I don't like to usually say that because it sounds so pretentious. And your writing is not pretentious. It's very, very real. It's very, very in the moment. Has an honesty and a rawness to it. And is that something that you were aiming for? Because it's not pretension. It's honest and raw, you know? Beautiful. First of all, thank you. It's mildly embarrassing, but I'm very pleased. Thank you that you feel that way about that section. No, I mean, that just came out. And then I'm not sure if I even edited it. But what happens is if you're living in the world of a book, as you write, you may have these moments where everything just sort of sings. And maybe you reach a passage where you've written a few lines and they seem to work well. Because you've already been living in the book and you just have an aha moment. Certainly I'm more articulate when I write than when I speak. But it's also, that was an idea that did come to me over time in following the characters. We were talking about identity before and the idea that your relationships are also part of your identity. And that sort of built up. and came to me as an understanding. It's not something I set out to say, but came to understand through Eleanor. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just a brilliant line and brilliant section of lines. So there are four sections to the book. Did that come in during the editing process? Or did you always see them as I feel like sometimes we sit down with an editor and they're like, okay, we can break this up into four or three or whatever sections. No, no, I always had, I think I might have had more parts earlier. But I did have parts because, again, it's almost like a wheel. And because I have this tendency, which some of it was edited out, I like to repeat things because it's almost as though I'm walking down the street and I see something happen. And then you're coming from the other side of the street and you see it happen differently. And that is information for the reader. So I did break it into parts because you have quite a few characters. I think I counted it one day. There may actually be nine characters in the present day. There are only three main characters, but there are all these other people. And then in the past, there are a number of characters. And so I also sense that it needed to be broken up a bit to, you know, you're in the past, you're in the present. And then something pivots because it now goes into another aspect of the story. How we ended up with four parts, I say we. I don't quite remember because I know it was during the editing process that we either had affirmation of that's okay with the number of parts, but where maybe there was a slight shift in, do we want to end on this note and just begin with that next part? So that it's a clean break, you know, so it was an interesting process. Yeah, the editing process is an interesting process that most people do not learn or think about because. It's okay. I've got this. And then the editor will come in. If you've really got a great editor, they'll sit there and say, wait, but we could sharpen it or we could edge it, or we could do this and move these parts. And it's a conversation between the two of you. So when did you first start writing like your first, like four years ago, five years of the notes for these short little scenes that you were writing that ended up becoming the book? Oh, no, I, um, probably. The swimming scene was about 2017, 2018. Okay. And I had already written a short story about this woman who dresses up in an animal costume to earn money on the side. So you know what that is. That's actually Benny. Right. And then I had some other scenes. And in fact. I would say that maybe about 2018, I realized I had a novel because I was trying to put the project together and was actually trying to get into some kind of residency to write it. And one of the things that happened to me is that much later, around the time I finished, I would look in my files and I'd see things that I thought would be in the novel. I'd open them up and read them and then I'd close them and relabel them. No. or surplus. So it really was bits and bobs. In 2018, I felt I was writing a novel. And in 2018, there was a black cake. Okay. And I had already finished the novel. And I actually wrote the first draft. Once I felt I had a novel quite quickly, then I was redoing it, revising it. And was looking for people to help me publish this. And it was 2019. And I started to revise one more time. And the pandemic began. And I thought, oh, darn it. Because, I mean, obviously it was a very serious thing. But the point was that I realized that this was something that was not going to leave us for a while. And my story had gone into 2021. And so I thought, oh. dear, I think I'm going to have to collapse the story because otherwise I'm going to have to engage with the pandemic. And this isn't a story about that. And I don't know where it's going. And you know, it's a good thing. We didn't know where it was going. And so it stops just before, but it's interesting that the original story went forward because a whole year would pass before those final scenes. Right. And you know what they are. And so then everything was sort of scrunched together. move it back, like move back. There's so many authors who said, I just want to avoid the pandemic. My books are going to either be in 2019 or they're going to start, they thought in 2022, probably 2023 at this point. But it was very interesting. People said, I just, nothing is going to be set during that time because I'm just not going there again. No one is going to wear a mask. No one's going to wear a mask in a book. So, yeah. Well, for me, it was more that the story was done. It's just that I had allowed them a bit of time. And so I sort of had to. collapse certain things and shorten certain timelines because it would have been a different story. Totally different. Really different. You know, it's interesting. Your agent, Madeline Milburn, is located in the UK. And she's the agent for two other authors that we've interviewed this year. And I think we've done about nine interviews. So this is really funny. She's also Nita Prose, who wrote The Maid, another book I loved. And Catherine Faulkner, who wrote Greenwich Park. And it's just so funny, which brings me to ask, like, when did you start working with Catherine, with Madeline on Black Cake? When did you get your agent deal? Let's put it that way. at the height of the pandemic I was sitting in my apartment in Rome where I wrote this story I mean I wrote this story while day jobbing on other communication projects all from my dining table and I was set I was ready to send this I felt okay I thought it was completely finished it was but you know I I really had no idea what the process was like and I really just loved some of the work that she'd represented, work that was very different from my work like you know Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, you know very different, but I also noticed that she loved certain stories as well that had been written by people who were not represented by her and so I sent her a few pages and that's when we started working together in July of 2020. she called me right away and said, you know, can I see the rest? And we started talking. Love it. Absolutely. It was just so funny because I said these three people, because I said that her name keeps coming up when I was doing my research. And I was like, wait a second, I have two other authors that we've actually, you know, spoken with. I have to meet her somewhere along the way because she definitely has my taste in books. You have to, she just, and she has a broad taste in books and she's just a wonderful source of energy. And in fact, when I was trying to find out a bit more about what that relationship would be like, I called someone named Nita Prose. So I understand what, you know, and she just said, oh, it's wonderful. So it's exciting because Nita's book is so different from mine. Very different. I love the maid. I love the maid, but so different. And that's another story that it appears to be one thing on the surface, but then it's burrows down and starts to address some other issues. and Greenwich Park I have yet to read it but I hear it's just fantastic and it was out a year ago in the UK so it was like okay now start talking about your book again like you're talking about your book and it's like remember that book you wrote like you know a couple of years ago so it was really fun so was the title of this always black cake was that always going to be the title black cake was always in the title and so not to corrupt you I will not tell you what I thought it might be but it was always black Kate. Yeah. Something. Okay. There we go. Now I have been looking at this cover for over a month. Okay. Cause I've read this book over, you know, and I am going to be really embarrassed to tell you that very humble that I just noticed there was a woman behind like these eyes yesterday. Okay. Now that is really embarrassing to the point. I went back and looked at the galley and said, it was there. How did you miss it? So obviously I didn't look at the title a lot. cover a lot because I was so busy reading the book. But I just want you to know that I had totally missed that. Now, it's caught up with the stunning colors, whatever. I feel like the bright colors, and we'll look at the UK cover in a couple of seconds, but the colors on this, I just thought it moated so much about, I saw water, I saw the Caribbean, I saw finally a woman, and I was seeing all of this. Was this the first try on the cover, or were there other renditions on the US cover? It's close to what I saw the very first time. And I should say that the designer who handled most of that, her name is Jaya Maselli. And it's just absolutely beautiful. But it came out of a conversation that was kind of a brainstorming about what are the kinds of things that are important. And everyone agreed that although cake is important and food and how food helps people to transfer identity. and stories in their lives. Water was really important too and to everyone who was working on that project and it's just and you mentioned the UK cover which is like a compromise because it focuses on another aspect but water for me certainly really the layers you know if you look at the colors you're talking about layers you're talking about currents they're different currents and the fact that the woman is hidden to some extent. You know, it's like a play on the, it's like an optical illusion almost. it's you know the matriarch in this story her story is hidden we don't know that much about her we don't even use the name of the island because the idea is that it's supposed to be in a bit of a fog you know even though the historical details are correct details um so i like that i think it's just stunning it's really just a stunning cover gave me a chance to go find something that was colorful and wear in the middle of winter you But it was just so beautiful. But I just couldn't believe that I didn't see there was a woman behind. I feel like I should, like, you know, some optic illusion test. I would fail. No, but I love that about it. Because if you hold, well, I always notice the little eyes. Right. But even things like the water coming through her, the current coming out of her mouth, as if it were, you know, it's like stream of consciousness, story, a current of water. But it also evokes the briskness of so many parts of the book. because they're just brushstrokes. And a lot of your writing is like a brushstroke. It's like an unfinished, it's sort of like the Pollock kind of a thing where everything goes on the board. And I'm really not kidding about this, but, and it's really the way I would see the book is it's going to be beautiful when you put this all together, but there are all these little threads and pieces. And it very much reminded me of a Jackson Pollock painting of it's all there. And then all of a sudden it just works when you look at it with your eye. And you're just like, it is telling a cohesive story there. So there you go. As you spoke of that, of course, I think of, you know, the old documentary films of Pollock flinging the paint from his brush or pouring things out. But it is true that I often write out of chronological order. I may see it, but I'm just writing as it comes. Then you start to put it together. But his bursts of color are like your bursts of. great writing. There's a short chapter and it's just like this. And then we're going to go here and you actually are seeing color as you're reading the story. You're not just seeing the black cake, you're seeing the crib and you're seeing the waters. And you're also seeing what these people were feeling. You were writing their feelings, if that makes sense. And it sounds like some, like I've been into like some like ashram for about a month, but I haven't, but it's just like, you're just, you know, the whole feeling of the writing comes through that way. So How about the audiobook? Did you have a chance to pick the narrators for the audiobook? Well, there's, you know, there's a whole team of professionals who work on that, but they did offer an opportunity to hear the people ahead of time. And I just want to say that I'm just really thrilled with the work that was done by Lynette Freeman and Simone McIntyre. And I think they do a wonderful job of going back and forth. between accents and feelings and ages. And it's going to be an interesting book because I'm in a book group and I'm trying to, we're reading The Maid this month. And I said, I'm looking for a black cake for next month. I said, I think you guys really enjoy it. And I'm sure somebody's going to bake a black cake too, just knowing my group. But it was really interesting because I said, a lot of them listen on audio. And I said, you're going to have to be very careful listening on audio because it's a very different experience because you're going to have to put a, you're going to have to concentrate. Because you're going to hear something very, very quickly. And you're going to have to think. Because in reading, it's something different to me than hearing. And some people may hear better than I do. But when you have short bursts, it's like, well, wait a second, where am I going next? And I just think it'll be an interesting thing that I've told them to think about, you know, ponder. So Black Cake is in development as a Hulu original series. And I'm going to have to read this. Produced by Marissa Jo Serrar, Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films. and Capital Entertainment, which is like, okay, you've got a New York Times bestseller, you've got all these other things I talked about earlier, and now in development is original. Are you involved in that project at all? Are you executive producing? Where are you? There will be creative involvement, but this is really very much a film project being put together by people with much more experience than I have, and with their own creative vision. very, very excited about this. They're already working on the project and eventually it will grow to then include other voices like mine and say, you know, this is where we're going. It sounds very great, but it's going to be interesting to see how they interpret what you've written. And because there are things that you can do on the big screen that you can't do in writing and there are things in writing, how do you actually convey that? How do you, you know, convey the story? I can see the two of them sitting with the recording and the cake in the freezer. I could definitely see that part. So. So what's next for you? Because selfishly, I'm hoping that there are going to be some notes for another book. I'm hoping that's what you're going to say, but I'll take flash fiction, too. Well, I'm working on some other writing as well. I am working on other writing and I won't go into that too much. And I'm also doing a lot of reading, trying to read books by other people way, way behind titles from last year that I haven't even gotten to. But just and I. I did some reading for myself, a little bit of research. You know, it's so interesting that you say that about like last year, I actually have a shelf of books from I think 2019, 20 and 21 that I never got to, but they're there because I will not give those books away. Those books are, there's still things I'm planning to go back to. And I have such a hard time because I can't go behind because we're doing interviews. We're trying to do what's current or whatever. And it's just so funny because I'll sit there sometimes and go, but. But that would be so nice. You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like that playing catch up. I do. I think it's much more pressure for you because what happens is someone will say, oh, so I'm going to do a talk with that other author. Quick, let me read her book. And I remember that there was a two week period where I read about six books because I had a very specific reason to read those books. And some of them were proofs or galleys. Right. you know, the advanced copies of books before they come out. And then I try to play catch up and I'm still looking back at 2021 thinking, oh, oh, oh. And then something I read won an award. So I thought, oh, great. I had that one under my belt, you know? So that's where I am. Yeah. Nailed it. Nailed it. This has been such a pleasure for me. I tell you, this book is one I'm highly, highly, highly recommending and hold up against everybody can see. And. I thank you because I think you took my reading to a different level and reading this book, because when I was reading, I was thinking a lot more. Sometimes I'm just paging and reading through and I'm enjoying the story, but here I was really thinking about how is this person going to connect? What is she doing here? What is she doing in her storytelling? And that's an art. And I completely was just blown away by it. And you never know it was your first novel. I was like, Ooh, this is first. Can't wait to see the second. Well, that's really, it's really wonderful to hear. And I'm glad that, you know, you've gotten something out of the book, because I will say it can be a nerve wracking thing. But I really believe this. I'm a reader. You're a reader. I love books. But I don't like everything I read. And why should I? And why do I have to read what other people are reading necessarily? So I so appreciate it if you make a connection, because each of us is different. And it's more important that we're sharing stories with one another. you know, getting something out of them. Yeah. You know, I would say people say, well, you don't talk about books you don't like. I said, because that's not my job. I said, my job is not to tell what people not to read. I'm not the reading police. My job is to tell people what I've enjoyed and what I've really enjoyed and the rest. It's not my job to sit and be talking about that. And because someone else may love it, just because I don't, doesn't mean that that's the seal of approval or not on a book. And I feel very strongly about that. And we feel very strongly about that when we do our reviews, it's like. We want to do things that would make people want to read the books. So if we're too like happy, well, tough luck. Well, it's really been great talking to you too. And I really appreciate how closely you read the book. And I'm framing that line. I'm telling you, I'm framing that line. I'm going to figure out how to get some nice type. And I'm framing that line. Believe me, it's like one I want to go back and think about a lot. Thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to whatever you do next. And really, really appreciate the time it took to talk with us today. Carol, thank you so much. It was great to meet you. And to our readers, look forward to seeing you next time on Book Reporter Talks To. And don't forget to follow us. You can either sign up for our channel on YouTube, either that or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much, everyone.

It's also a book that I will tell people, I'll just hold it up and say, just read this. And I'm not going to give them anything else. I'm going to say, just read this.

So that's the kind of book this is. And on that note, welcome Charmaine. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So looking forward to this, let's start by you telling us about Black Cake.

Just give us a little background. Well, you know, it's a multi-generational story. So it takes, it goes back and forth between the past and the present.

And in the present day, it's a pretty straightforward thing, or so it seems. You have a brother and sister, Byron and Benny, who were once inseparable, born and raised in California. They have fought, they've sort of grown apart, big rift in their family. And they're forced to come together to deal with their mother's death.

It's the first time they're seeing each other in years. And they also are about to discover that their mother has this hidden past. And part of it is connected to this strange inheritance.

She's left them this small black cake, a Caribbean fruitcake, sitting in her freezer. And why the cake? So she's left this whole...

voice recording on a USB 10 drive that goes on for hours and hours in which he talks about all of these different people. And it's all going to come together. It's going to change the way in which Byron and Medin see their mother, their family, and also themselves.

And it's also going to require them to take action. It's going to require them to do something with their lives, live their lives a little differently. So that's kind of the overall plot. then there are just all of these side stories and and it just gets into other people's lives in part through the stories of their mother Eleanor and it really sort of starts to tease out the idea of you know who you think you are your own identity and how other people see you and how that affects your life and the power of stories you to shape all of that. The story has power to shape who you are and how you see yourself, not only when it's told, but when it's not told.

Things that are left out there that then come to light. You know, so many stories of family have bound sisters and a family of women. And I felt that the brother-sister relationship here really added something. It contributed to the dynamic because, you know, men often think differently from women. And so the way they're both going to approach this, I think, made it a very different story.

Did they come to you as a brother and sister from the start? Because it just added something so huge. Yes, they did. But I should say something about the way in which I write. I did not sit down, first of all, to write a story about cake.

And I did not sit down to write a story about a brother and sister. I just went with the scene. I tend to write in scenes. I tend to follow emotions, ideas.

And my singular idea was these two girls, not sisters, but close friends, obsessed with the sea. And because they were strong swimmers and swam out in the sea, they were physically exceptional. They were very strong. And their attitude towards their world will change their lives, gets them into trouble and also helps them to overcome obstacles.

So that's really where I began. And I didn't even know then that I was writing a novel. But the brother and sister did come together. I was writing some other stories. I thought maybe they'd be a short story or something linked.

And there was always sort of Byron and Benny. Byron, about nine years older than Benny. And a sort of organic tie between them.

A really strong love, but also a strong sense of disillusionment, of confusion. and not quite being able to find their way back to how they began as a very close brother and sister. And you wonder why they're apart.

And you're going to understand that more as time goes on. The recording was a very clever way for them to learn what their mother had to say, because if it had been a letter, they would have read it very quickly. And they might have skipped over the salient parts, because you can do that if you're just reading quickly. And this measured storytelling allowed you to measure storytelling, the book as well, was always envisioned as a recording, because it just made so much sense, because I'm thinking, If this was just a letter, they would have read it in about five minutes, digested it.

But hearing her voice and how she was expressing herself would add to whatever was happening in the story. Am I on to track? Well, yes.

I mean, it was the idea of, again, the story, storytelling. It's more like a conversation. She had this need to talk to her children who were estranged from one another, who were not talking to one another.

The daughter has been gone for quite some time. So she did have this need to speak. And I would say that pretty much from the beginning, I knew there was some kind of secret, but I wasn't sure where. And it just emerged that she would speak to them. Speak to them and keep telling the story.

You know, the two young girls that you referred to were seemingly fearless. They're swimmers and have these characters that are, they're at the heart of the story and their bravery and their energy. First of all, did you make them swimmers because that would be something that we would see in the islands and where they were? I didn't make them swimmers. I just started writing one day.

And I know you've read the story. So you'll know that I just started writing pull, pull, pull, pull is referring to the movement of the arm in the water. And I actually wrote a very short story based on that.

And then it just kept going and going. I will say this. My parents grew up in the Caribbean and they were both very strong swimmers.

And my mother was even a competitive swimmer. Never saw her swim in the sea, but I did see my father. And I was fascinated by the kind of person who would strike out and keep going towards the horizon in the sea.

And I also ran marathons when I was younger and had friends who were triathletes. And again, I was fascinated by the people who would throw themselves into the water and just keep going. They'd get kicked in the face, they'd get kicked in the chest, and they would just go. And that was not me.

I'd swim in a swimming pool. I love the sea. But I have never been the kind of person who would ever strike out towards the horizon. So I think that has always been in my head. head.

And as this scene emerged, it emerged as a kind of two things, a very deep connection to the natural world, but also the idea of people who were so different, at least in my mind, so different from anything that I could really imagine, that they had to be, even as teenagers on the cusp of womanhood, mythic in their own way. That's how I imagine. Yeah, they were.

It was just, this is what they were going to do. They didn't have surfboards. I think like we know surfboards, but they would just go out on the water. And if the water was rough, it didn't matter to them. They would just go over the waves and keep on going.

So you knew automatically that these women, these women that you were coming to know that you didn't know who they were going to be were really, um, adventuresome. They were really adventuresome. They were brave. They were not going to be sitting on the beach being admired by boys.

That was like, not what they were going to do. And Did you surf at all when you were growing up? Did you hit the water like that at all? No. There are certainly, as in fiction, we take all sorts of details from either our own lives or things we've seen or read or heard.

That's how the logic of the imagination works. But I can tell you, I do not surf. I was never an open sea swimmer. Yes, I ran marathons. And I drew on that.

I did draw on that sometimes when I was trying to imagine. that connection. I do understand what it's like to reach a certain point mentally in physical activity where nothing will stop you.

And it's a dangerous, it's a dangerous confine to live. You know, you're right on the border. You will keep going at the risk of collapsing, even if you're not running for the Olympics.

And so I sort of drew on that feeling, people who would push themselves and push themselves only these girls really were very strong you know they weren't me hobbling along in a marathon you know um and and and so that that very much was um a work of the imagination. So no, I never learned to surf, never swam in the open sea, but I've always been fascinated by that connection with the water, having loved the water myself, the person who will go out to meet the power of the sea and work with it and listen to it, because ultimately the sea is the powerful one. Yeah. And the power of a person who can swim or surf.

The true power is the ability to observe, understand, and try to meet what's already happening, the power over which you have no control. Yeah. And that's exactly what they're doing is they're just out there risking at any single moment. There's a risk thing that's involved as well.

I'm with you. I'm swimming in pools. I was tumbled once in the ocean and I was like enough.

And I was like, I don't think, and I will say, if we go to the Caribbean, I will swim in the water if it's calm down there. which is just beautiful. But when it's the really wild surf, now I'm sitting on the beach reading the book. I'm so perfectly happy with that.

At the start of each chapter, there's a name or a word. And thus we know what this chapter is about, or maybe we don't, or we know we're going to learn something new. And often it's a new character being introduced to us.

And that chapter may give us pause because who is that person? Were there chapter titles at the very beginning? Because I know you are a stream of consciousness. short scene writer.

And I think that we need to get that across to everyone because you'd mentioned it before. And do you handwrite those short scenes or do you type or what do you do? Well, one of the best things that ever happened to me was learning to touch type when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. And I did work in news and communication, you know, all of my professional life before really saying, I want to spend more time doing what I've always wanted to do, which is write fiction.

So it's very easy for me. As I'm speaking to you now, it's just very easy for me, Carol, to just start typing. So I stream of consciousness. Let's turn it into a verb.

I stream of consciousness into my laptop. But I do also write by pencil. I have to use a pencil. No pens.

I have a pen here. And I do actually scribble sometimes a scene or an idea. But it's not necessarily a beginning, middle and end. It might be a few words.

It might be an impression. And then it's all so many going to come together at some point in a very different way for you because you've never written a novel before. It's going to get to that. So you've lived in many places.

I think you were born in New York, lived in the Caribbean and London for a while. And now Italy. Am I right? Or actually just Italy. Yeah, just Italy.

I do have family in the UK, but essentially, no, I'm. Both coasts of the United States. I went to college in New York, graduate school in California, moved back and forth, and then ended up in Italy.

Which is quite lovely, said my relatives, who would love to have me come there and visit. You must, you must. I'm not really a Fitzgerald, I'm a Sassetti.

It's just easier to spell once I got married. Let's say that. Did it give you some idea of what it must be like for the characters in Black Cake? Because they live. in so many different places.

And you really get to these places and you have to immerse yourself into that culture to a degree, but you always have what your background was as well. You bring something with you, but then you adapt to what the places are. Is that what's really going on in the book? Well, it's very much, you know, when I write, and we were saying this before, and I probably didn't even answer your question about stream of consciousness. I really do just go.

And I'm not thinking too consciously about where I'm going. I'm only thinking of the feeling. And sometimes that happens with place. And I'm not sure what the answer to that question you've asked would be, except that the logic of the imagination has this way of mixing what we observe in real life, what we take from real life, with the mind.

the, you know, the meandering of the mind. And so I think what you're saying, make sense, you know, you, you start, you just start following an idea, but you're drawing all along on things that you've seen or heard or lived or experienced or, you know, read. Yeah, and I think that's along the way.

And let's get to the black cake. Now, when we tease this book in November to our readers, we do a monthly preview of. what's coming, what you want to have on your radar. I immediately said, I need to find a recipe for black cake. And within an hour, one of our readers had written and said, I found one.

And then another reader wrote and said, I found one too, which was just like really funny to me. So have you ever made black cake? I have.

It's just that it took me quite a while to get a black cake, meaning a very dark cake. And the color comes from a combination of how rich it is, meaning how much of the fruit soaked in rum you add to the mix. And also the blacking, which is basically a burning of dark brown cane sugar.

So it took me a while to understand that you really needed a lot. of both. But my mother was a legendary black cake maker.

She called it plum pudding, we called it rum cake. But many Caribbeans call it black cake. And she made this amazing plum pudding, rum cake, black cake. So that memory is what I strive for.

And I'm happy to say that mine tastes pretty good. But for a few years there, it was woefully brown. So I really had to work to get it darker.

To get it to move to the right direction. You know, it's so funny. There's a recipe in the discussion guide that the publisher put together, the U.S. publisher.

And I saw that some ingredients needed to be soaked for four months. So when I wrote to our reading group guys, readers this week, I said, OK, I just want to tell you, this is not for next month's book club. This is for a couple of months out.

And I did find a place to buy it online that I'm going to drop into the links below. So in case anybody's not intrepid enough. And. And we'll include the other link to the other recipe as well. But you're not going to make it.

We know someplace you can buy it at this point. It may not be as good as yours. But I realize that people in book clubs are going to want to sample the cake. And when I got there and I said, so soak the ingredients for four months.

And I'm like, OK, we'll be meeting on this when? Over the summer. So did you actually soak them or can you buy or pre-soak?

Do you did it? I imagine you can. But, you know, like a lot of people who have this tradition in their household or their family.

I had never eaten the cake that was purchased before last fall, all my life. I had never eaten a cake that hadn't been made by someone, you know, that I knew, my mother or an aunt or someone. And the people I know who make this always keep fruit soaking, they call them fruits because there are various kinds, soaking in a jar in a dark, dry place.

And so that's something that comes into the story, as you know. Yes. And is even used in an amusing episode, but it's true.

It's a sacred thing. It's in there, you know, it's hiding away, waiting for usually Christmas time, usually Christmas time. But then there are the emergency situations like weddings and you have to sort of ramp up your supply.

So interesting. And in the book, when you do take it, it's very, it's very, very funny moment. It's like, wait a second, do we have the fruit? Do we get the fruit with us?

We must go bring fruit. I just love that. You know, for years you wrote flash fiction. And can you share what this is to readers? Because I think that when they understand you're writing a flash fiction, they're going to understand how much of the book came together to be a two paragraph or few line chapter.

You know, flash fiction, I should probably explain what it is. It's one of many terms, but probably the most popular, used for very, very, very short stories. So we're talking about maybe a page or two. or even a paragraph or two.

And I like to write what's known as microfiction, which is a mystery to me because I'm a chatterbox. But you know, I love to write short. And even when I write longer things, I did work on another novel, which never saw the light of day.

And I, again, wrote it in the same way. I just write in short bursts until I realized that I was creating a whole universe that required a novel. And that's what happened with Black Cape.

So going back to the flash fiction, I had reached a point in my life where I'd always wanted to write stories. I always said that I'd be writing when I didn't really, I spent most of my energy writing for other people, which was great, you know, working in news as well. It's a great way to sort of be part of your community.

But it was different. And I kept wanting to just let my mind wander. And the difference between what I did before and what I started to do with flash fiction was I always knew where I was going when I was writing news or other communication. You had some idea.

With flash, I would just go with a feeling. The thing that distinguishes that kind of writing is it's not just a short story. It's a very intense kind of gaze.

Again, maybe on an emotion, maybe on an object or an idea. And often one plays with structure. A number of poets become flash fiction writers. I don't consider myself a poet.

I really like to write prose, but I love that... When I was starting to write in a way that seemed to come naturally to me, not being sure where that would lead me, and this was about half a dozen years ago, I discovered this whole community of people who were doing this sort of thing. And it almost gave me permission. It was like a, ah, let me just exhale.

I have permission to write a story in a slightly different way. But, you know, coming to this point, I'd say, Carol, I think that really very often flash fiction is just like conversation. And so I think that the novel Black Cake, in a way, is like conversation.

Meaning maybe I'll say, oh, Carol, I need to tell you this story. I went down to the store and then I saw that guy. You know that guy. So maybe I tell you a beginning, middle and end.

But then it might be. Oh, I forgot. I forgot.

You know, you know, the dog, you know, the dog, and maybe you talk that way. Some people write that way. We jump around.

Yes, we don't always tell a story in a linear fashion. But very often when we talk, we do kind of get the story across, right? And that's, um, I think that's how most people tell stories. We just don't realize it. Yeah, they're not that concise.

It's going to be, well, let's go over here for a little bit. Oh, but wait, you're right. The dog.

Oh, wait. But the dog climbed on. Did you see that? Yeah, exactly.

You know, one of the things that I liked about your brisk chapters, what they were concise, but continued great storytelling. I could read a few paragraphs and know the answer to a question enough to move the story forward. Like, who is this person?

Why is this name of this chapter? They're really concise, really quick. I'm in.

I'm out. At points where you were viewing what you had revealed and what was to be revealed. As part of the editing process at some point, because you've got, this is, this book is like peeling an onion back and we're going to get to the middle and we have all these layers. And sometimes the layers might just like not completely come off the onion. So you're not quite sure it's going to happen.

And what I was thinking is along the way, the brisk chapters were still the concise storytelling, but did it all have to get put in a certain place? Like the... chapter about so-and-so that's only going to be this long should it be here or should it be here picture you shuffling on the floor with pages and you know I tend to do that more in my mind but what I would do is I wouldn't shuffle the whole page but I will pick up a pencil at a certain point and start scribbling and saying well if I put this chapter about Carol there but then she shows up here maybe I can't have that line in there because it's too soon and I need to wait. So I would do that after.

I tend to write that way. I will say that it was actually more fractured and more out of chronological order, because can we say that the story in theory goes back and forth between two timelines, and in both cases, very vaguely goes forward in time. But chapters are out of chronological order sometimes, or you'll see repeats, and those are intentional.

And I have to say that, you know, I think that the editing process, once I'd reached the publisher, you know, the publisher was just wonderful. And in particular, the editor for Penguin Random House, Hilary Rubin Tiemann, was just wonderful in asking stories. I mean, not asking stories, asking questions about the story and also saying, I really love this.

We really love this. Maybe you want to consider putting two short sections together. Mm hmm. So that.

the reader has just enough time to stay with that character or idea a little bit longer. And it was a challenging but also wonderful process because I was reassured very quickly that I was still able to write in short bits, that I could still jump around. But the cryptic nature of the writing, I'm not sure that's always a good thing, but that is very much me. I don't always name places.

I don't always name people. I don't describe people. Yeah. But, you know, I read an interview that you did with Penn where you said, when writing scenes of great drama or violence, I sometimes skip what others might consider obligatory details.

I've written passages that were quite spare and even cryptic, and I believe that a scene can carry sufficient information and emotional weight for the reader, even without all the particulars. And I love this line, omission has presence as well. And I found that that's what I loved about the short pages. And did you go back to edit them to be even more spare? Because you've written a number of short stories.

Many of them are prize winners. So you obviously have a knack for writing short and tight. And I just saw that some of these paragraphs, you could just see how you could have trimmed them back, even from what you had written, because the words that were there were the ones that mattered.

You know, and again, this takes us back to the idea of flash fiction. Without a doubt, precision and omission are beautiful tools to use in storytelling because they allow the reader to participate in a different way. Because the reader has their imagination.

The reader has their understanding of what may be happening in the world. And I think it's a kind of a balancing act in which you trust the reader. you know, I'm a reader, I love books.

And so if I tell a story, can I trust the reader to meet me halfway? But I would say that I tend to be, I tend to go more towards the spare and cryptic in some scenes. And so the editing was not as much of an issue there.

It was more of a challenge to be sure that I didn't leave so much out. that I was going to lose the reader along the way. Yeah, they had to have enough clues to be fair along the way of what was going to happen.

And, you know, Eleanor reveals so much to her children during her discussion with them, their one-sided discussion. More than thought, it was such a great way to just leave a message that no one can really interrupt and say, but mom, it's just like, here's what it's going to be. And one can tell that the character and development of character means a lot to you. And you can just see it where you're telling her story and how you're leaving us of who she is, the good and the bad, the things that she changed, the thing that she did.

Do you just sketch out ideas of them as you wrote, or did they just come organically? Because she's telling this real big backstory. No, no, they came organically, without a doubt.

I'm the kind of person who at a certain point when I realized I had a story growing. It was sort of an aha moment. I had the girls swimming and Benny, who's the daughter, who's the daughter of this matriarch.

I had a story that I thought was a short story with Benny. And all of a sudden I was writing that other thing that I saw was growing. And all of a sudden I went, Benny, wait a second, Benny is part of this family.

And that's when it started to go. And Byron was already in there. So I would say that it really was an organic process. However, throughout, I would say much later, I had to go back and take a look and do things like double check years and locations and think really carefully about whether when I do research, when I did research for this story, I called it my plausibility check. Because really, I had imagined the story and I tend to see things in a wheel, or we might call it a pie chart.

So I could kind of see the whole story. I could see the story. Sometimes someone would walk into the story and I thought, oh, there's that person. Oh, well, that's interesting. And the cake was not in the story initially.

The cake came into the story. But the moment the cake came in, I understood where it had come from. and how much it could come to symbolize because of some thinking that I'd done, you know, about food and identity and diaspora. So yeah, it's organic.

And then I take a pencil, and I do a lot of mind mapping. That's what we call mind mapping. Someone more honest might call it doodling. Because I literally, I literally draw diagrams, little squares with names and then arrows and well, yeah, but if this person is here, does it make sense if that person's there? And if this happened, could it really happen in that year?

Let me go do some research. Does this make sense? So, you know, that's the nature of my writing.

It starts with impulse, with feeling. I begin to see the world taking shape. And then I reach a point at which I ask myself, and this goes back to your question, am I conveying?

what I'm seeing in my head. Is that making sense? And it's also wonderful, you know, when you work with an editor who says something like, and this happened to me, gee, you know, Byron and Benny, we're just sort of wondering, you know, what about this aspect of their relationship? What about that? And I'd go back to my laptop and I'd call up what I thought was just a background file, notes.

And I go, oh, I guess I can use that. I'll put that in, you know. Because it was all kind of there.

I had that story in my head, but how you convey that is another issue. And, you know, there's so many times you just come up with great ideas and you just throw them all down and you're like. Are they really going to be great?

And I call the staff all day long and say, is this a good idea or a bad idea? You can tell me it's a bad idea. Because there's so many people that I find that run things that just come in.

I remember years ago, there was an ad for an author. And I thought it didn't convey what it should say. So I said something to one of the publishers.

And they said, we're having a marketing meeting. I'll bring it up. And I said, what happened? They said, well, the publisher came in and said, isn't this the best ad we ever ran? And then no one said a word.

And I said, you know what? is what I've always shaped my career around doing, is not saying I know the answer. And what you're saying is, you don't know the answer.

If you say you don't know, you can really explore things a lot more, because you're not saying, it's black, and it's white. It's, let's pull in the colors, and let's see what's going on. Well, it's not for me to speak for other writers, but I think it is true of a lot of writers, and that is, and again, this comes down to the difference between the writing I do in fiction and the the kind of writing I would do before, you often don't go in.

I don't go in with a preconceived notion. And you talk about having the answers versus asking the question. Often people write because they're exploring. They do see the story. So I saw the basic story.

I wrote the, I don't want to throw out spoilers, but as you know, there is a murder in the story. I wrote the scene in which the reader, but not Byron and Benny, comes to understand what sort of happened. You know, they come to a better understanding of what happened. I wrote that fairly early on.

I mean, I had that. So there were just a lot of things that I knew in terms of positioning in the story, but I was always exploring who were these people? How could Benny be so vulnerable?

in her life and seem so needy and sort of little girlish, and yet actually be so completely secure in who she was? How could she struggle so much, and yet never have a doubt about who she was? And that has to do with, again, I was exploring really issues of what is identity?

You know, you have shifting concepts of identity and family. And we often talk about knowing who you are. Well, who are you really?

You are who you believe yourself to be, how you identify, but you're also who you have to be in the world. How do you navigate the world? How do you deal with running up against other people's expectations and stereotypes?

How do you separate your identity with the people you love? How do you separate your identity from the people you love? How do you separate your identity from the people you resent, you don't like, you blame, you fear? So those are some of the other issues that were in there in the novel Black Cake that helped to create these characters. But for me, it was an exploration.

I was getting to know them. You know, it's like I meet you one day, we talk, and then I meet you in a month and we talk about other things. Yeah.

And the role of women changes throughout the book. reflecting the changing of the times. So did this require, once again, you're looking at your research going, wait, did that really happen in that timeframe?

Is that really what women would be doing? Or were you relating family experiences that you knew of? Because we can learn a lot from family without even looking things up and say, remember aunt so-and-so when she told that story? Well, how old was she? And when did that happen?

So it was looking up or relating, a little bit of each? A little bit of each without a doubt, because- Without a doubt, there were ideas that came to me that were settled into my head from having grown up in a family where a number of people lived in the Caribbean. A few people migrated twice, like the parents in the story Black Cake, twice meaning from the Caribbean to the UK. which if you go from an English speaking island made a lot of sense, and then to the United States. And certainly stories, funny stories, but essentially, I went with the imagination first, the idea, and sometimes then had to look it up.

For example, in the UK, there are these two nursing students. And one of the questions I had was, would they really be living in an apartment or a boarding house? in such a way that they would also have friendships with a couple of other girls? Was it plausible they'd have access to the kitchen? In those times, we're talking about the end of the 1960s in London.

So that's where I would do the research. Whereas the relationship sort of came organically. You know, there's this great line where Eleanor talks about her life as being one long swim. I love that.

Breathe deep and wide. Take it one stroke at a time. I feel like I need that framed on my wall.

I want to have that up with your name underneath it as breathe deep and wide and take it one stroke at a time. Because so many times we're just trying to see the other side where we have to get to. And you're not really like it's this is what happens along the way.

Does that also reflect how you view life? If it's like, just keep it going one stroke at a time? Well, you know, people who know me would say, no, you're always thinking about what about the future? And then what if this happens and I need to be plan and I need to prepare?

So there's that side of me. But without a doubt. One has to somehow find a way to also just be in the moment.

And I think that we need that one to concentrate and to be productive, but also just to hold on to our, our health, you know, our mental health. And sometimes you just need to slow it down one thing at a time. And I think that's two years. You had to slow it down. You didn't have a choice.

You had to slow it down. You had to think about what mattered, what didn't matter, what you had to do. It was something that became nothing at all. Like, it's just like, it's not important anymore because it doesn't really matter. So I feel like, yeah, it's, it really, you sit there and say, breathe deep and wide, take it one stroke at a time.

She had that up on March 20th, 2020. But, you know, it could also be seen as a metaphor, for example, for the whole act of writing. When you write a story, often people will say, oh, I should write a novel or I really want to write a memoir. And, you know, I really don't have that much experience, Carol. It's my debut novel. I kept saying I wanted to write, but I've really only spent this much time writing in the past several years.

But I will say this, you know, Annie Lamott also said this in her book on writing bird by bird. You know, you have to think of just just keep going. You cannot always think I'm writing a book. You don't do that with a marathon. You say you're writing, you say you're running a marathon, but you don't go out and run a marathon.

You go out every day. I remember going out saying, I'm going to run eight miles today. And it was so hot. It was in Connecticut. It was really humid summer.

And I was so determined that I just thought, no, I'll just stop at three miles today. It's okay. It's not over. I haven't lost the race yet. You know, there's time.

So I think that's a metaphor for writing and for doing a lot of things that we do in life. We can't, we can't. frighten ourselves by looking too much at the big picture.

It is useful to look at the big picture in life, but in some things, you know, just go one stroke at a time. Just slow it down. Let's see what happens.

You know, there's so many lines in this book that I love that I'm going to give you another, and this is actually more than one line. When you lived a life under any name, that life became entwined with others. You left a trail of potential consequences. You were never just you.

And you owed it to the people you cared about to remember that. Because people you loved were part of your identity too. Perhaps the biggest part.

You know, I rarely use that line that so many people say, well, those are gorgeous sentences. But those are gorgeous sentences. And I don't like to usually say that because it sounds so pretentious. And your writing is not pretentious. It's very, very real.

It's very, very in the moment. Has an honesty and a rawness to it. And is that something that you were aiming for? Because it's not pretension. It's honest and raw, you know?

Beautiful. First of all, thank you. It's mildly embarrassing, but I'm very pleased.

Thank you that you feel that way about that section. No, I mean, that just came out. And then I'm not sure if I even edited it. But what happens is if you're living in the world of a book, as you write, you may have these moments where everything just sort of sings. And maybe you reach a passage where you've written a few lines and they seem to work well.

Because you've already been living in the book and you just have an aha moment. Certainly I'm more articulate when I write than when I speak. But it's also, that was an idea that did come to me over time in following the characters. We were talking about identity before and the idea that your relationships are also part of your identity.

And that sort of built up. and came to me as an understanding. It's not something I set out to say, but came to understand through Eleanor. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just a brilliant line and brilliant section of lines.

So there are four sections to the book. Did that come in during the editing process? Or did you always see them as I feel like sometimes we sit down with an editor and they're like, okay, we can break this up into four or three or whatever sections. No, no, I always had, I think I might have had more parts earlier.

But I did have parts because, again, it's almost like a wheel. And because I have this tendency, which some of it was edited out, I like to repeat things because it's almost as though I'm walking down the street and I see something happen. And then you're coming from the other side of the street and you see it happen differently. And that is information for the reader. So I did break it into parts because you have quite a few characters.

I think I counted it one day. There may actually be nine characters in the present day. There are only three main characters, but there are all these other people. And then in the past, there are a number of characters. And so I also sense that it needed to be broken up a bit to, you know, you're in the past, you're in the present.

And then something pivots because it now goes into another aspect of the story. How we ended up with four parts, I say we. I don't quite remember because I know it was during the editing process that we either had affirmation of that's okay with the number of parts, but where maybe there was a slight shift in, do we want to end on this note and just begin with that next part?

So that it's a clean break, you know, so it was an interesting process. Yeah, the editing process is an interesting process that most people do not learn or think about because. It's okay. I've got this. And then the editor will come in.

If you've really got a great editor, they'll sit there and say, wait, but we could sharpen it or we could edge it, or we could do this and move these parts. And it's a conversation between the two of you. So when did you first start writing like your first, like four years ago, five years of the notes for these short little scenes that you were writing that ended up becoming the book? Oh, no, I, um, probably.

The swimming scene was about 2017, 2018. Okay. And I had already written a short story about this woman who dresses up in an animal costume to earn money on the side. So you know what that is. That's actually Benny. Right.

And then I had some other scenes. And in fact. I would say that maybe about 2018, I realized I had a novel because I was trying to put the project together and was actually trying to get into some kind of residency to write it. And one of the things that happened to me is that much later, around the time I finished, I would look in my files and I'd see things that I thought would be in the novel.

I'd open them up and read them and then I'd close them and relabel them. No. or surplus. So it really was bits and bobs. In 2018, I felt I was writing a novel.

And in 2018, there was a black cake. Okay. And I had already finished the novel. And I actually wrote the first draft. Once I felt I had a novel quite quickly, then I was redoing it, revising it.

And was looking for people to help me publish this. And it was 2019. And I started to revise one more time. And the pandemic began. And I thought, oh, darn it. Because, I mean, obviously it was a very serious thing.

But the point was that I realized that this was something that was not going to leave us for a while. And my story had gone into 2021. And so I thought, oh. dear, I think I'm going to have to collapse the story because otherwise I'm going to have to engage with the pandemic. And this isn't a story about that.

And I don't know where it's going. And you know, it's a good thing. We didn't know where it was going.

And so it stops just before, but it's interesting that the original story went forward because a whole year would pass before those final scenes. Right. And you know what they are. And so then everything was sort of scrunched together. move it back, like move back.

There's so many authors who said, I just want to avoid the pandemic. My books are going to either be in 2019 or they're going to start, they thought in 2022, probably 2023 at this point. But it was very interesting. People said, I just, nothing is going to be set during that time because I'm just not going there again.

No one is going to wear a mask. No one's going to wear a mask in a book. So, yeah. Well, for me, it was more that the story was done.

It's just that I had allowed them a bit of time. And so I sort of had to. collapse certain things and shorten certain timelines because it would have been a different story. Totally different. Really different.

You know, it's interesting. Your agent, Madeline Milburn, is located in the UK. And she's the agent for two other authors that we've interviewed this year.

And I think we've done about nine interviews. So this is really funny. She's also Nita Prose, who wrote The Maid, another book I loved. And Catherine Faulkner, who wrote Greenwich Park.

And it's just so funny, which brings me to ask, like, when did you start working with Catherine, with Madeline on Black Cake? When did you get your agent deal? Let's put it that way.

at the height of the pandemic I was sitting in my apartment in Rome where I wrote this story I mean I wrote this story while day jobbing on other communication projects all from my dining table and I was set I was ready to send this I felt okay I thought it was completely finished it was but you know I I really had no idea what the process was like and I really just loved some of the work that she'd represented, work that was very different from my work like you know Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, you know very different, but I also noticed that she loved certain stories as well that had been written by people who were not represented by her and so I sent her a few pages and that's when we started working together in July of 2020. she called me right away and said, you know, can I see the rest? And we started talking. Love it.

Absolutely. It was just so funny because I said these three people, because I said that her name keeps coming up when I was doing my research. And I was like, wait a second, I have two other authors that we've actually, you know, spoken with.

I have to meet her somewhere along the way because she definitely has my taste in books. You have to, she just, and she has a broad taste in books and she's just a wonderful source of energy. And in fact, when I was trying to find out a bit more about what that relationship would be like, I called someone named Nita Prose.

So I understand what, you know, and she just said, oh, it's wonderful. So it's exciting because Nita's book is so different from mine. Very different.

I love the maid. I love the maid, but so different. And that's another story that it appears to be one thing on the surface, but then it's burrows down and starts to address some other issues.

and Greenwich Park I have yet to read it but I hear it's just fantastic and it was out a year ago in the UK so it was like okay now start talking about your book again like you're talking about your book and it's like remember that book you wrote like you know a couple of years ago so it was really fun so was the title of this always black cake was that always going to be the title black cake was always in the title and so not to corrupt you I will not tell you what I thought it might be but it was always black Kate. Yeah. Something. Okay. There we go.

Now I have been looking at this cover for over a month. Okay. Cause I've read this book over, you know, and I am going to be really embarrassed to tell you that very humble that I just noticed there was a woman behind like these eyes yesterday. Okay. Now that is really embarrassing to the point.

I went back and looked at the galley and said, it was there. How did you miss it? So obviously I didn't look at the title a lot. cover a lot because I was so busy reading the book.

But I just want you to know that I had totally missed that. Now, it's caught up with the stunning colors, whatever. I feel like the bright colors, and we'll look at the UK cover in a couple of seconds, but the colors on this, I just thought it moated so much about, I saw water, I saw the Caribbean, I saw finally a woman, and I was seeing all of this. Was this the first try on the cover, or were there other renditions on the US cover? It's close to what I saw the very first time.

And I should say that the designer who handled most of that, her name is Jaya Maselli. And it's just absolutely beautiful. But it came out of a conversation that was kind of a brainstorming about what are the kinds of things that are important. And everyone agreed that although cake is important and food and how food helps people to transfer identity. and stories in their lives.

Water was really important too and to everyone who was working on that project and it's just and you mentioned the UK cover which is like a compromise because it focuses on another aspect but water for me certainly really the layers you know if you look at the colors you're talking about layers you're talking about currents they're different currents and the fact that the woman is hidden to some extent. You know, it's like a play on the, it's like an optical illusion almost. it's you know the matriarch in this story her story is hidden we don't know that much about her we don't even use the name of the island because the idea is that it's supposed to be in a bit of a fog you know even though the historical details are correct details um so i like that i think it's just stunning it's really just a stunning cover gave me a chance to go find something that was colorful and wear in the middle of winter you But it was just so beautiful.

But I just couldn't believe that I didn't see there was a woman behind. I feel like I should, like, you know, some optic illusion test. I would fail. No, but I love that about it.

Because if you hold, well, I always notice the little eyes. Right. But even things like the water coming through her, the current coming out of her mouth, as if it were, you know, it's like stream of consciousness, story, a current of water. But it also evokes the briskness of so many parts of the book.

because they're just brushstrokes. And a lot of your writing is like a brushstroke. It's like an unfinished, it's sort of like the Pollock kind of a thing where everything goes on the board.

And I'm really not kidding about this, but, and it's really the way I would see the book is it's going to be beautiful when you put this all together, but there are all these little threads and pieces. And it very much reminded me of a Jackson Pollock painting of it's all there. And then all of a sudden it just works when you look at it with your eye.

And you're just like, it is telling a cohesive story there. So there you go. As you spoke of that, of course, I think of, you know, the old documentary films of Pollock flinging the paint from his brush or pouring things out.

But it is true that I often write out of chronological order. I may see it, but I'm just writing as it comes. Then you start to put it together.

But his bursts of color are like your bursts of. great writing. There's a short chapter and it's just like this. And then we're going to go here and you actually are seeing color as you're reading the story.

You're not just seeing the black cake, you're seeing the crib and you're seeing the waters. And you're also seeing what these people were feeling. You were writing their feelings, if that makes sense. And it sounds like some, like I've been into like some like ashram for about a month, but I haven't, but it's just like, you're just, you know, the whole feeling of the writing comes through that way. So How about the audiobook?

Did you have a chance to pick the narrators for the audiobook? Well, there's, you know, there's a whole team of professionals who work on that, but they did offer an opportunity to hear the people ahead of time. And I just want to say that I'm just really thrilled with the work that was done by Lynette Freeman and Simone McIntyre. And I think they do a wonderful job of going back and forth.

between accents and feelings and ages. And it's going to be an interesting book because I'm in a book group and I'm trying to, we're reading The Maid this month. And I said, I'm looking for a black cake for next month. I said, I think you guys really enjoy it.

And I'm sure somebody's going to bake a black cake too, just knowing my group. But it was really interesting because I said, a lot of them listen on audio. And I said, you're going to have to be very careful listening on audio because it's a very different experience because you're going to have to put a, you're going to have to concentrate.

Because you're going to hear something very, very quickly. And you're going to have to think. Because in reading, it's something different to me than hearing. And some people may hear better than I do.

But when you have short bursts, it's like, well, wait a second, where am I going next? And I just think it'll be an interesting thing that I've told them to think about, you know, ponder. So Black Cake is in development as a Hulu original series.

And I'm going to have to read this. Produced by Marissa Jo Serrar, Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films. and Capital Entertainment, which is like, okay, you've got a New York Times bestseller, you've got all these other things I talked about earlier, and now in development is original. Are you involved in that project at all?

Are you executive producing? Where are you? There will be creative involvement, but this is really very much a film project being put together by people with much more experience than I have, and with their own creative vision.

very, very excited about this. They're already working on the project and eventually it will grow to then include other voices like mine and say, you know, this is where we're going. It sounds very great, but it's going to be interesting to see how they interpret what you've written. And because there are things that you can do on the big screen that you can't do in writing and there are things in writing, how do you actually convey that? How do you, you know, convey the story?

I can see the two of them sitting with the recording and the cake in the freezer. I could definitely see that part. So. So what's next for you? Because selfishly, I'm hoping that there are going to be some notes for another book.

I'm hoping that's what you're going to say, but I'll take flash fiction, too. Well, I'm working on some other writing as well. I am working on other writing and I won't go into that too much. And I'm also doing a lot of reading, trying to read books by other people way, way behind titles from last year that I haven't even gotten to. But just and I.

I did some reading for myself, a little bit of research. You know, it's so interesting that you say that about like last year, I actually have a shelf of books from I think 2019, 20 and 21 that I never got to, but they're there because I will not give those books away. Those books are, there's still things I'm planning to go back to.

And I have such a hard time because I can't go behind because we're doing interviews. We're trying to do what's current or whatever. And it's just so funny because I'll sit there sometimes and go, but.

But that would be so nice. You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like that playing catch up. I do. I think it's much more pressure for you because what happens is someone will say, oh, so I'm going to do a talk with that other author.

Quick, let me read her book. And I remember that there was a two week period where I read about six books because I had a very specific reason to read those books. And some of them were proofs or galleys. Right. you know, the advanced copies of books before they come out.

And then I try to play catch up and I'm still looking back at 2021 thinking, oh, oh, oh. And then something I read won an award. So I thought, oh, great.

I had that one under my belt, you know? So that's where I am. Yeah.

Nailed it. Nailed it. This has been such a pleasure for me. I tell you, this book is one I'm highly, highly, highly recommending and hold up against everybody can see.

And. I thank you because I think you took my reading to a different level and reading this book, because when I was reading, I was thinking a lot more. Sometimes I'm just paging and reading through and I'm enjoying the story, but here I was really thinking about how is this person going to connect? What is she doing here? What is she doing in her storytelling?

And that's an art. And I completely was just blown away by it. And you never know it was your first novel. I was like, Ooh, this is first.

Can't wait to see the second. Well, that's really, it's really wonderful to hear. And I'm glad that, you know, you've gotten something out of the book, because I will say it can be a nerve wracking thing. But I really believe this.

I'm a reader. You're a reader. I love books.

But I don't like everything I read. And why should I? And why do I have to read what other people are reading necessarily?

So I so appreciate it if you make a connection, because each of us is different. And it's more important that we're sharing stories with one another. you know, getting something out of them.

Yeah. You know, I would say people say, well, you don't talk about books you don't like. I said, because that's not my job. I said, my job is not to tell what people not to read. I'm not the reading police.

My job is to tell people what I've enjoyed and what I've really enjoyed and the rest. It's not my job to sit and be talking about that. And because someone else may love it, just because I don't, doesn't mean that that's the seal of approval or not on a book.

And I feel very strongly about that. And we feel very strongly about that when we do our reviews, it's like. We want to do things that would make people want to read the books. So if we're too like happy, well, tough luck.

Well, it's really been great talking to you too. And I really appreciate how closely you read the book. And I'm framing that line.

I'm telling you, I'm framing that line. I'm going to figure out how to get some nice type. And I'm framing that line. Believe me, it's like one I want to go back and think about a lot.

Thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to whatever you do next. And really, really appreciate the time it took to talk with us today. Carol, thank you so much.

It was great to meet you. And to our readers, look forward to seeing you next time on Book Reporter Talks To. And don't forget to follow us.

You can either sign up for our channel on YouTube, either that or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much, everyone.

Transcript for:Insights from Charmaine Wilkerson's Interview

Transcript for:
Insights from Charmaine Wilkerson's Interview