When women are in partnerships—being a wife or a girlfriend of a partner—we take on all these different roles but they’re always changing. Our jobs are always changing and evolving.
So many stories are written for/about male heroes with a traditional, predictable plot. That’s not to say that I didn’t and don’t hope other people would read and be interested in these stories, but I wrote them first for myself.
You could write about this weird thing, and people who like to read will be down to find out about this different world. It’s a very different situation in a nightclub or a theater.
The opening—that split person—might serve as a metaphor for a book told from the perspective of a person embroiled in grief: someone half in the past, trying, in different ways, to get out.
Unawareness can be exhaustion, but the very act of poetry is recognition—witnessing. To tell her truth, Nguyen must tell what is, to her, a mystery itself.
Abdurraqib merges the personal and the universal in such a way that I cannot help but feel a part of these moments, despite some of them taking place before my birth, or before I was conscious of basketball’s existence.
I wanted to write about faith in a way that people who are not Christian, or do not understand that worldview, could read and have a more nuanced approach to faith.