The heart of myself, I would say, is like, the negative way to put it, honest with myself. I would, is the way that I would like to repackage that. I love us. I'm not going to lie. If it's not, if it's not good, it's not going in. For this book, I did feel that it needed to be a little bit of a kitchen sink book, but it needed to have everything because I wanted it to be generational.

Like I had that ambition for it.

They put, I think, I don't know, on a lot of the marketing copy era defining, and if there

is an ambition I had, it was like, what is this moment that we are living in and where

we are we going?

And I did want to write that.

Welcome to the Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host,

Tracy Thomas, and today I am joined by Angela Flournoy. She is an award-winning novelist and

writer. And today she is here to talk about her

second book, The Wilderness, which has been long listed for this year's National Book Award.

It follows the 20-year friendship of five black women over the course of their lives. Today,

Angela and I discussed how she thinks about writing as a lifelong reader, why she wanted to write a book

about black women and friendship

and how the content of her novel helps shape the way that the story is told. And we talk a

bunch about hard novels, easy novels, and the types of books that excite us. Angela will be

back on October 29th to discuss this month's book club pick, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Everything we talk about on each episode of The Stacks can be found in the link in the show notes.

And an exciting announcement, The Stacks is now on YouTube.

You can catch video clips and shorts at YouTube.com.

Our handle is at the Stacks pod, just like it is everywhere else.

So go subscribe to watch videos of this conversation and all of our future conversations. If you like what you hear

today, if you want more of this podcast, more bookish content and community, consider joining

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