A quarantine reading list from our favorite authors

Some years ago, when I was living in Nigeria for a summer, I ran into Wole Soyinka at a cultural center in Lagos. There he was with his signature cloud of white hair, no entourage around him. Knowing only that he was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for literature, I felt compelled to ask him for a photograph which he gruffly declined.

There were no hard feelings; I took the encounter as a sign that I was supposed to continue writing and blogged about it like a nerd. But even after that chance encounter, I never made any serious attempt to read his work, cowed by both his prolific output and the inaccessibility of his most famous medium, plays, which I generally hate reading, much preferring to see them mounted on a stage.

I’ve been trying to take more of a bucket list approach to my reading under lockdown, however, and so after reading a spate of white American authors back to back, I decided it was time to give Soyinka his due. I chose to read his childhood memoir, published in 1981, five years before he would win the Nobel.

I had a vague idea that Soyinka could be a comical writer (I had read what Soyinka has dubbed his “overanthologized” poem “Telephone Conversation”), but his sense of humor really comes across in this delightful account of his early years, growing up in a rambunctious household as the son of a headmaster and headstrong saleswoman in the city of Abeokuta in southern Nigeria.

From getting lost while following a crowd of masqueraders to the conflicting disciplinary methods of his parents, Soyinka paints a compelling picture of a pre-independence Nigeria, complete with neighborhood fixtures, like Paa Aditan, the self-appointed warrior ready to defend the town from Hitler and an ingenious family guest who always knows how to wheedle his way into getting more food.

And then there is Soyinka’s thrilling recounting of the Abeokuta Women’s Revolt, spearheaded by the brilliant activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Wole’s aunt and mother of the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. I finished the book with a renewed appreciation for Wole Soyinka’s considerable talents. Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

Author to Author:

Sarah Weinman chats with Ivy Pochoda

L-R: Sarah Weinman (credit: Weinman); Ivy Pochoda (credit: Maria Kanevskaya)

Ivy Pochoda's new novel These Women is about five very different women connected by a serial killer in South Los Angeles. Here, Sarah Weinman — author of The Real Lolita and editor of the forthcoming anthology Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession — chats with Pochoda about crime fiction, women's stories, and the voices of South LA.

To read Ivy Pochoda is to be in the company of one of the most distinctive and thoughtful crime writers working today. These Women features women on a spectrum of strata and race, wildly different in demeanor and motivation, all linked — knowingly or otherwise — to a different specter, of the man responsible for a spate of unsolved disappearances in and around downtown Los Angeles. What makes These Women stand out is how it deprioritizes the mystery in favor of the complicated lives of the various women, struggling in the underclass or drowning in privilege, raising their voice when others would prefer they shut up. Pochoda wrote a crime novel we were always going to need, but never more than now.

She and I caught up over email to talk about These Women. The Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Sarah Weinman

SW: When I finished reading These Women, my first thought was that you had essentially reverse-engineered the traditional serial killer tale. You centered the stories of the women in his orbit, de-emphasizing the killer almost entirely. Did you have that purpose going in, or was that shift in focus something that emerged as you were working on the novel?

Ivy Pochoda: I never really wanted to write a serial killer book in any traditional sense. I had watched Nick Broomfield’s documentary about Lonnie Franklin, a Los Angeles serial killer, Tales of the Grim Sleeper. In the course of the film, his crew of buddies, as well as his son’s girlfriend who lived with him, go from the traditional shock and disbelief that Lonnie was a violent criminal to admitting they witnessed seriously unhinged behavior, saw weapons and photos of naked, possibly tortured women. I was transfixed by the amount of denial these people must have lived with in their daily lives.

Franklin didn’t interest me very much. I couldn’t even begin to conceive of writing about the motivation or psychology of a killer. What fascinated me, instead, were those around Lonnie Franklin — or my version of him — and I wanted this book to be their story. I realized while watching the Broomfield doc that the people in his orbit, his friends and family, are also his victims. Franklin fooled and deceived them and forced them to exist in the specter of so much covert and overt violence. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard their story told.

Let's talk about Feelia. Because hers is the first voice we get, and it is distinctive and ferocious. (“Hey. You wanna pull back the curtain, lemme see your face. All I hear is you breathing in the dark. In out, in out like one of them machines.”) Was it easy to inhabit her voice, or did you struggle to get it at that precise pitch?

Oddly, Feelia’s voice was one of the simpler things about writing These Women. The idea to incorporate her character came halfway through the writing process. I was stuck on the story and started messing around with a first person voice just to avoid staring at a blank screen. Her voice is a distinctive voice you hear on the streets in my neighborhood, in South LA and in downtown.

I teach creative writing in Skid Row, Los Angeles, and I’ve spent a significant time there. The streets are loud, almost musical. I love listening to the accents and inflections and the different ways people tell stories. Feelia has a nice aggression to her that was attractive to write and she has a point and purpose to everything she is saying.

I want to hear more about the structure of the book and how you arrived at it, because it is tricky: crossing time, voices, sensibilities, and elevating perspectives we don't see often in crime fiction except as tropes. I’m thinking, of course, of Feelia and of Julianna, both of whom do sex work without apology and with confidence, but not only of them.

It occurred to me all at once, when I landed on my subject, to write from the perspective of several women. And I knew I wanted to write each of their stories as a self-contained unit then move onto the next character. Of course, I understood many of the characters would have to appear in other sections and that delighted me and made the story cohesive in my head. I realized that the story should be contained into a number of days that these women are brought into contact with one another. Feelia was a later stage addition that broke the linear frame. But she provided a contextual anchor for the book and because of that was the character who was able to drive the book to its conclusion.

You've said elsewhere that Dorian [whose daughter was murdered] was the toughest character to get right. I wondered why that was so. Her pain and her grief are palpable but she definitely does not adhere to what we think of as the "victim's mother" role, which I take as a good thing, but I suppose must have made it more difficult to write.

Frankly, she was the hardest [to write] because she has the least to do and is the least interesting from a strict plot sense. She’s stagnant and stagnated. She’s trapped in the past which gives her less to do in the present. The reason she was hard to write was that I needed to give her something beyond simply being the “victim’s mother”, to make her feel human and well rounded without that thing being contrived.

What I love about your work is that you operate pretty squarely within crime fiction, but also blur the lines, almost like you backed into it accidentally but now feel much more settled in the genre. And that happened as this new wave of LA crime novelists — I’m thinking of Attica Locke, Steph Cha, Liz Little, Sara Sligar, Jessica Knoll, Rachel Howzell Hall, among others — are working in parallel but overlapping ways. What is your specific crime project, and how do you think it is in conversation with these other novelists in particular, but also with crime fiction as it is today?

The truth is, I couldn’t be happier to have stumbled into such an incredible community. I’m not sure what my mission is. I don’t think ahead too much and each time I write a novel, I surprise myself by how the novel becomes a crime novel even if that wasn’t my intention. I think readers are being more generous with what they classify as crime, and that’s great. I’m really hoping that this is a two way street and that those who refuse to venture outside a strict “literary” paradigm, begin to see the literary value — the terrific prose styling and profound emotional depths — of the writers working the crime genre.

What interests me about Steph, Liz, and Attica’s work, among other writers, is actually not the crime elements, but the way they have used crime as a portal into a world I know little about. I think crime is an amazing vehicle to explore communities underserved in fiction. And I think that’s the way these terrific writers and I overlap. Our concern moves far beyond the whodunnit and the whydunnit, and into the sociological and communal reverberations. ●

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