INTERVIEW

Solidarity and Kinship: Daphne Palasi Andreades Interviewed

A choral coming-of-age novel.

JANUARY 25, 2022

In Brown Girls (Random House), the debut novel by Daphne Palasi Andreades, a group of girls in Queens, New York, grow up together on the page. The girls lie “starfish-like and still, atop sun-warmed concrete in backyards”; they sneak out for secret dates; and they sneak out for secret meetings with their friends at Dunkin' Donuts, worrying about the judgment of their families and their futures. They then walk each other home until they “come to the block where our routes split.” Their routes will further split, though they continue to narrate as one entity, a "we," as they pursue many different careers, as they meet their partners, as they have children or choose not to, and as they eventually face their own mortality. Andreades's language is gorgeous and lyrical, but it is also funny and irreverent, as when the girls ride rented bikes across the “fart-smelling” East River. The effect is joyous, imbuing a multiplicity of experiences into a unified “we” that feels incredibly fresh and alive, both universal and specific.

Andreades and I met several years ago when we were among one of the last work-study waiter cohorts at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. It was a formative time for me, and I was also lucky to hear her read from an earlier version of the novel when it was a novella. An excerpt would eventually win an O. Henry Prize, and Brown Girls has now received two glowing reviews in the New York Times. As I read the final version, I felt joyous, too, at the world about to discover someone I had known to be an exceptionally talented artist. We corresponded about the novel over email this winter.

--Mary South

Mary SouthYou’ve described the first-person plural of these girls as a “choral we.” I was delighted by that chorus, how the girls would sing lyrics by Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, how certain phrases and clauses would repeat like a refrain. There was often a fragmentation to the sentence structure that suffused your pages with imagery, as well as a compelling use of parataxis, as in “…we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil. Color of the charcoal pencils our sisters use to rim their eyes.” This added to the choral feel to me. How did you find the voice?

Daphne Palasi AndreadesThank you—I love this description of my work! In all honesty, the choral voice of Brown Girls came to me as if I were in a fever dream. I wrote the opening pages on my subway ride home from a graduate fiction workshop with the author Elissa Schappell. 

Schappell was one of the best writing teachers I had; she told me what I needed to hear most to feel free on the page. For example, she encouraged us to take risks in our writing: thematically, formally, and in terms of emotional vulnerability. This resonated with me deeply and helped me feel free to experiment and make a mess. I took a risk and was drawn to this unconventional point of view, the “we.” I wanted to write using a perspective I hadn’t really read or studied before. Additionally, a personal risk for me was writing about my hometown, Queens, this incredibly vibrant and diverse place that I was hungry to see represented in literature.

It took time, several drafts, and conversations with my workshop-mates, trusted readers, and later, my editor to clearly articulate on the page who this “we” was. Eventually, I decided it would be a breadth and range of women of color, the daughters of immigrants coming-of-age in Queens. They would be women of color across different diasporas. In making this choice, I was interested in exploring the solidarity and kinship that can, and so often does, exist between people of color. The “we” allowed me to examine shared experiences of, for example, how forces such as colonialism and imperialism shaped the characters’ family histories. Also, the gender and familial expectations that are imposed on them, and the racism and marginalization they face in contemporary America. I knew that this chorus of voices would be tough, smart, brash, and tender all at once.

MSThe novel is formally playful as well. It’s told in a series of titled vignettes, some of which run for pages, others which are only a paragraph or two long. And some vignettes are in list form, as is the chapter “Our Mothers’ Commandments,” which is a list of rules like “Command #1: You shall not be a troublesome girl, the kind who disagrees and doesn’t know how to be quiet…” How did you think about structure?

DPAI had a lot of fun telling the story through vignettes and playing with structure, as well as thinking about how to incorporate other forms to tell this story. For example, in addition to vignettes and lists Brown Girls also features footnotes, song lyrics, a court document, monologues, snippets of Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Tagalog (to name a few). I was really inspired, in part, by wanting to do something different than what I’d been reading and studying at the time. 

I was also drawn to using vignettes for different reasons. Before I turned to fiction, my first creative writing lessons were actually in poetry, as an undergrad. Poetry taught me about precision, rhythm, musicality, the sonic qualities a text could have. It taught me about the power of specific, concrete images. In my poetry classes, I was introduced to the poetry collections Citizen by Claudia Rankine and Bluets by Maggie Nelson—works that I actually see as hybrid texts. Encountering these works had a huge impact on me: these authors were so voracious. They used fragments, elements of visual art, philosophy, history, social media, and so much more. In grad school, I was introduced to this writer Jayne Anne Phillips whose work blurs poetry and fiction. Overall, I realized that the hybrid form of Brown Girls is a reflection of the hybrid identity of the characters. 

Photo of Daphne Palasi Andreades by Jingyu Lin.

MSIndividual girls are often called out by name, though rarely for more than a line here or there, with one exception: Trish. Could you talk a little about your choice to have her recur throughout the novel, and outside of the “we”?

DPATrish was a challenge to write, but in the best way possible. She was a challenge because, well, I don’t usually plot things out, and I didn’t when I drafted Brown Girls. So much of the joy of writing for me is the process of not knowing where I’m going and discovering the sentences, characters, and world as I go along, particularly for the first draft. I like that uncertain but exhilarating and intrepid feeling. 

I had a similar process for writing Trish. Although, of course, one could definitely say there are drawbacks to this method; I remember handing in some very rough early pages to my workshop that centered Trish, a character who leaves Queens for Los Angeles, who has a different fate compared to the others. (I don’t want to say more than this!) Anyway, my workshop-mates annoyingly, but rightly, questioned why Trish was given her own section outside of the “we” voice. I had no clue myself and left class that day feeling extremely frustrated. Hilariously, as it happens sometimes, that frustration made me determined to clarify this character to myself and to render her intentionally on the page so that others would understand, too. 

Trish, to me, is a character in the book who, whenever she appears, signals that a seismic shift is about to occur. She’s an omen. She’s also the character who happens to bring the others together, whether they like it or not. Trish brings them back to their hometown, and sometimes reminds the girls of who they are when they become strangers to themselves.

MSOutside of the choral "we," you also include other “we” perspectives: from their relatives, most frequently their brothers and romantic partners. A particularly poignant section involved the chorus reflecting on how their mothers used to be brown girls themselves. How did you go about thinking about the other “we” character groups?

DPA Oh, that’s such an interesting read, Mary! I actually didn’t see the “we” as inclusive of these other character groups—the mothers and brothers—whom you mentioned. Rather, I saw the choral “we” as composed of these young women of color who, like hawks, are always observing and forming opinions about the people in their lives. It’s really cool to see how the book, in the eyes of readers, takes on a life of its own.

In terms of the storylines of the mothers in the book, I wanted to capture the differing beliefs, experiences, and relationships to the United States. between the first and second-generation immigrant characters. The first-gen characters, like the mothers, moved here as adults, had to become fluent in English, and raise their children in a country far from their loved ones. To them, this country represents a land of economic wealth, opportunity; they believe in the idealism of the American Dream. By contrast, their children, the primarily second-generation protagonists, have a different experience: they’re raised on American soil, attend American schools, and are more familiar with its history. I’d say they are also more aware and critical of the underlying ways that whiteness is centered within education, their careers, and their own family histories. So, there’s a generational and cultural divide between them, which is a central conflict in the book. 

For the brothers, I wanted to explore how racism and marginalization impact them differently. The boys benefit from patriarchal systems—for example, they’re given more “freedom” within their own families—but face different prejudices and challenges as men of color in America.  

MS You introduce these girls at puberty and follow them through old age. Without giving too much away, I thought it was such a bold choice to end how you did. And while time often feels centered around girlhood in the '90s, it also had this wonderful fluid feel. You reference contemporary events as well: Trump and Coronavirus. How did you navigate time while drafting, and how did you decide where you should end?

DPAI wrote Brown Girls during a time that, when I look back on it, was one of the most tumultuous and uncertain periods of my life—both in the world and personally. I started writing the book in 2017, during Trump’s presidency, amidst a ton of anti-immigrant sentiment, which felt utterly soul-crushing and enraging. In 2020, I promised myself I would finish writing Brown Girls. Then the pandemic upended the world. New York City shut down I was furloughed from my two jobs and filled with fear for my family members who are health care workers in Queens, which at that point was called “the epicenter of the epicenter.” I seriously questioned, then, if art was worth pursuing. During the first and second waves of the pandemic, however, I wrote non-stop; writing gave me structure, and creating was life-affirming when I felt like my spirit was dying. In many ways, my debut novel, Brown Girls, is an artifact of who I was, where I was, and all that was happening in the world at these different moments in time. 

To speak more specifically about the ending of Brown Girls—which briefly alludes to COVID, then proceeds to do some other completely wild shit that was incredibly fun to write—I just had this sense of absolute freedom that I could do any crazy thing on the page. I’m grateful for writers and mentors like Schappell and Paul Beatty who encouraged this approach and model it in their own work. Also, for writers like Anna Burns, Arundhati Roy, Julie Otsuka, and many others. I realized that the ending could be tragic, tender, funny, unexpected, and moving, all at once.

Mary South is the author of You Will Never Be Forgotten.

BOMB MAGAZINE