Americanah with Candice Carty-Williams
Sentimental Garbage
Justice for Dumb Women
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today we're talking to Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, a book that stands out on Sentimental Garbage for neither being sentimental nor garbage. In fact, it was very well reviewed from the moment it came out. However, this book has more in common with chick lit than you might expect. We talk about when sweeping romance meets cultural understanding, what it's like to write from a place of specificity, the second generation immigration experience, code-switching, masculinity in strong female houses, and why Alexa is a racist.
Music by Harry Harris, artwork by Gavin Day. Recorded at Acast and produced by Hannah Varrall.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to sentimental garbage, the podcast where we talk about the |
| 0:07.7 | chaglet that made us who we are. My name is Karen O'Donohu and I'm an |
| 0:11.1 | author, a journalist, and the ex-mistress of an Army general. |
| 0:14.0 | Today we're going to talk about to Amanda Nagosei Deitch's 2013 book AmeriCama with Queenie author, Candies Cardi Williams. |
| 0:21.2 | Hi. |
| 0:22.2 | Hi. How you doing today? I am good thank you. I've had two |
| 0:26.7 | photo shoots this morning and so I have been pulled about in in various ways. So this is actually me regrouping which is really nice, very soothing |
| 0:35.3 | in this room. |
| 0:36.3 | I'm looking incredibly glamorous and I'm feeling very intimidated just looking at you. |
| 0:40.3 | Thank you. My skin is itching and I would like to say my makeup off. |
| 0:44.0 | So what's interesting about, I think, I imagine a lot of our listeners will be quite curious about the |
| 0:49.8 | choice of this book because generally the books that we do are like incredibly |
| 0:54.5 | commercial books that get no critical success whereas this is incredibly |
| 1:00.7 | critical successful book. |
| 1:02.6 | Like it was huge when it came out, it's still huge now, |
| 1:05.4 | it won all sorts of prizes, and Jim Amanda is one of the most respected authors around, |
| 1:10.5 | I would think. |
| 1:11.8 | But what I think is interesting about this one is that people often miss the commercial. three I see it is like because it's so accessible and it's so about love and so and |
| 1:25.1 | obviously you know like so much is about love everything's about love books |
| 1:27.9 | films TV but it's so about that and like you you know, even though she writes amazingly, the structure of it, as you say, is so commercial. |
| 1:37.7 | It's just so accessible and it's just kind of like these are plot points that you understand. |
| 1:42.0 | But the way she goes about them is just |
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