Novelist Yaa Gyasi on following her sensational debut and not being on social media

Yaa Gyasi is calling from New York and, after the year that’s been, she is sounding optimistic about how things feel there – in particular, “a general sense of care for one another that has been really moving”. For her part, therapy and reading more than usual have been the ways she has been taking care of herself in this time. And, as an exhilarating focus, she has had the release of her second novel to think about.

The Ghanaian-American author’s first book, Homegoing, came out in 2016 to widespread critical acclaim and multiple awards and accolades. Following such a debut could carry certain pressure and expectation, but Gyasi’s team was nothing but supportive when it came to writing her second novel. “In fact, I think my agent said, ‘If it takes you 10 years, it takes you 10 years,’” she smiles.

“For me, the feeling, less than pressure, was more the sense of whether I could write again,” shares Gyasi of how it felt to sit down and start writing. “People say you spend your whole life writing your first novel – and that felt so true for me. I started thinking about Homegoing when I was 19, started writing it when I was 20, so to have it come out and be finished with, it was kind of like, ‘What do I do with myself if I’m not writing this book?’ I felt like I needed to write something else, just to know it was possible again.”

Transcendent Kingdom delves into the life of Gifty, a neuroscience PhD candidate at the Stanford University School of Medicine (studying reward-seeking behavior in mice), and her family, who left Ghana for Alabama before she was born. Gifty grapples with her family’s pain amid the harsh realities of their immigrant life in the Deep South. We learn that her older brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose as a teenager after a basketball injury left him dependent on opioids. Her father left the family to return to Ghana. Her mother is suffering from suicidal depression in Gifty’s bed. As she turns to science for answers that might explain their losses, she also wrestles with the evangelicalism and faith of her childhood and its promise of redemption.

The tension between science and religion is central to Gifty’s life and the book, with Gyasi drawing on her own Pentecostal upbringing in Alabama for the portrait of evangelicalism in the American South. Mental illness is another focal point of exploration; it was important to Gyasi to take care “not to give in to the stigma and the judgements around these illnesses, and particularly for these communities that I’m writing about – Black communities, evangelical communities, Ghanaian communities – where it’s not as commonly or as openly discussed as it is elsewhere. I wanted there to still be space for the grace and tenderness around these discussions to take place.”

Last year, amid the reckoning of racism, white privilege and supremacy that happened in the wake of George Floyd’s death, books by Black authors – Gyasi included – were given new attention and climbed bestseller lists. It was a long-overdue and difficult moment. “If the occasion for the renewed interest and success of your book is quite literally because of the deaths of your people, I don’t think it can be anything other than a sorrowful feeling,” Gyasi says. “It’s a strange time and a strange way to make a career. As a Black writer, you’re always having to make these concessions – that white writers don’t have to make – but this one, in particular, is upsetting.”

As often happens with the most captivating storytellers, audience interest extends beyond the characters and into the authors themselves. Gyasi has found ways to manage the unexpected attention that her work has brought – choosing not to be on social media and, as far as possible, keeping the personal and public separate.

“When I first started dreaming about being a writer, I certainly wasn’t imagining these other aspects of the career – being a public figure, having people care quite deeply what I had to say. That kind of attention can distort your perception of what’s real,” she considers. “For me, it’s been incredibly helpful not to have a social-media presence. Any thought I have that I could just put out in the world in 20 seconds, without the careful consideration that long-form pieces offer me, is a thought I’m not sure I’d be able to stand behind, even 20 minutes later. I’ve just found being offline is helpful for keeping my thinking intact – but it’s also protective for other reasons, too. The kind of slippage that can happen between the personal and the public in these careers can feel worrying for me. I would rather be able to keep what’s close, close.”

Gyasi’s two novels have both been released into periods of social upheaval and political change, bookending Donald Trump’s presidency. While her work offers searing portraits of contemporary society and culture, she doesn’t think too much about the climate it will be released into while she is writing.

“For me, one of the pleasures of writing long-form fiction is that it takes you so long that anything true about the world when you start the book will likely not be true by the time you finish it,” she reflects. “The things that were in the news in 2009, when I first went to Ghana to research Homegoing, were not at all what was in the news in 2017, when it came out.

“Returning to the same book every day, even as the world around you changes, just doing what the book requires – I find that really steadying,” she continues. “There is something freeing about understanding that you can’t control the conditions into which your book will be released. You can only control what you’re putting on the page.”

Transcendent Kingdom goes on sale from March 4 in the UK and is available in the US now