Jonathan Escoffery & A.M. Homes With Yvonne Conza: A Conversation

A.M. Homes is the author of 13 books, among them the bestselling memoir The Mistress’ Daughter; the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, The End of Alice, and Jack; and the short story collections Days of Awe, The Safety of Objects, and Things You Should Know. She also writes for film and television and teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University. In The Unfolding: A Novel (Viking) the Big Guy loves his family, money, and country. But unhappy with the results of the 2008 presidential election, he taps a group of like-minded men to reclaim their version of the American dream. As they scheme, the Big Guy also faces turbulence within his family. His wife, Charlotte, grieves a life not lived, while his 18-year-old daughter, Meghan, begins to realize that history, her favorite subject, is not what her father taught her. It’s a story that is as much about the dynamics within a family as it is about the desire for those in power to remain there. The Unfolding explores what happens when people living together under one roof have different definitions of truth, freedom, and democracy.

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and Agni, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. In his debut linked story collection, If I Survive You: Stories (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), it’s the 1970s and Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Yet even as things fall apart, the family, excluded from society as Black immigrants, remains motivated by what the couple’s younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Trelawny struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. If I Survive You unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness.

Yvonne Conza’s writing has appeared in Longreads, The Believer, Catapult, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, and other publications. She has been a finalist in several competitions, including the Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard Awards for creative nonfiction and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Bomb Magazine, Agni, Electric Lit, and Columbia Journal, Conza has interviewed more than 30 top authors, including Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Jamison, Meghan O’Rourke, and Jo Ann Beard. Conza is the co-author of the user-friendly dog training guide Training for Both Ends of the Leash (Penguin). She will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate the panel “How We Got Here: Issues Confronting Our Country.”