Another Brooklyn

ON WRITING ANOTHER BROOKLYN

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don’t always do or say what a writer wishes. I am often asked to explain this and find that I can’t — when I am inside my novel, it makes sense. But once I emerge from the world I’ve created, I find it difficult to go back to the moments before my characters walked through it with me. I guess in many ways, the characters a writer creates have always existed somewhere.

Long before I began to sketch the lives of August, Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, I was thinking about what it means to grow up girl in this country — remembering and imagining, as the poet Rilke wrote, “the powerful, the uncommon, the awakening of stones.” So while Another Brooklyn is a work of fiction, for the years the story took to feel “done,” I have lived inside the lives of my characters, asking questions of myself about their own survival — who makes it big, who doesn’t, who lives, what will they wear, do, say, how long or short is their hair, how old will they be at the beginning, in the end?

Who will they love? How will they leave us, and what will they leave behind?

And, most of all: What is the bigger story?

I do know that as the novel takes shape on the page, it’s hard for characters’ lives not to intersect with the writer’s own life. As we unpack our characters’ stories and actions, it’s hard not to unpack our own history. In Another Brooklyn, I looked back to my teenage years, mining them, rediscovering the deep love I had for my friends, the startling joy and fear of first loves, the will’s intensity to survive, and the slow-motion ferocity of the end of childhood.

When I started writing Another Brooklyn, I wanted to write about the bonds we share as young people and of all the parables of those bonds. I wanted to set this story in Bushwick — the neighborhood of my childhood, the neighborhood I once knew so well.

A writer writes to hold on. I wanted the Bushwick of my childhood remembered on the page — so I created four girls who were fascinating and foreign to me, stepping far outside of my own childhood. Then I sat them down in a neighborhood that was once as familiar to me as air.

I did not know what August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi would do or how they would do it. I did not know who would live and who wouldn’t. I did not yet know how I would feel, or how I wanted to feel, in the end. But I wrote toward the hope and longing for the girls’ survival. I wrote toward the questions I had as though I could plow through them with my own words and emerge more conscious and clearheaded.

Do I know more now? About girlhood? About what it means to be a woman of color, vibrant and visible and adored? About what it means to hold on to that love and then, just as quickly, let it go? I think so. .

Another Brooklyn took me on a journey. I looked up from the finished manuscript a little older, more thoughtful, and ever thankful for the village of women who have supported me as I wrote: my partner, Juliet Widoff; my sisters from other mothers — Linda Villarosa, Jana Welch, Toshi Reagon, Bob Alotta, An Na, Cher Willems, Nancy Paulsen, Kathleen Nishimoto, Kirby Kim, Charlotte Sheedy, Jane Sasseen, Jayme Lynes, Odella Woodson. . this list could go on and on.

My brothers from other fathers — Ellery Washington, Nick Flynn, Chris Myers, Kwame Alexander, Jason Reynolds. . this list, too, could go on and on.

This book wouldn’t be here without my crew from the past — Donald Douglas, Michael Mewborn, Maria and Sam Ocasio, Renée and Emilio Harris, Sophia Ferguson, and Pat Haith.

Tracy Sherrod and Rosemarie Robotham both helped me to shape this novel into something people living outside my head could understand. Thank you.

At the day’s end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her. Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse’s power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

— JW