![]() ![]() ![]() When - you know, any kind of intimate relationship, you are meeting that person's traumas, their wounds, their delights, their pleasures, not even theirs, but you're also meeting the delights and traumas and pleasures and pains of their parents and their grandparents. When you meet your love, you are meeting all the people who ever loved them or who were supposed to love them but didn't love them enough. You write, (reading) you are not falling in love with that one person. SIMON: Let me ask you about some of the words you use to address the reader. So what's happening inside of your mind is really not - it's not the all of you. But the other truth is that we are social beings. For Stela, her interior life is her - the place where she can go to protect herself, which is, you know, true for a lot of us, too. In a way, she's really different than Fly, her perhaps beloved, who lived in a household where he was constantly being bombarded by exterior things. And something I think people can particularly relate to now - she has very vivid dreams. SIMON: Stela has an artistic view of the world. YANIQUE: (Laughter) Can we say that on NPR? I love it. And I think it's fair to say he was almost nursed on weed. We think, where did I get this anxiety or this depression or these concerns from? You just have to look a few generations back. Her mother has a lot of anxiety about not having had parents. Stela herself is a product of her mother. But I think that it's - our individuality is much more communal than we probably realize. YANIQUE: You know, we often think of ourselves as solitary people moving around in the world as individuals. How do we see this perhaps affect the view of love that she develops and that Stela takes on as well sometimes? SIMON: And tell us, please, about Stela - growing up in St. YANIQUE: And it's something that Gary really struggles with. I mean, being able to let things go is an important part of becoming an adult. And this is a gift that he has, but it's also - as many of us who experience the world in this way - it can be a curse. And he's someone who believes in things that are greater than himself. Gary is - he's a person of deep and complex emotions. SIMON: Tell us, please, about Fly's father Gary - religious and then some, longing for a lost love well past what I'll call the expiration date. Like, I've read this novel so many times myself so that I could do it in a way that made a reader feel excited about it. But I'm a reader, so mostly what I do is I just read and reread. YANIQUE: I know writers are notoriously anal about these kinds of things. SIMON: Index cards, wallpaper - what do you do? SIMON: Because this is such a beautifully intricate novel that ranges from New York to the Caribbean and Africa, how do you plot it all out? SIMON: I have a burning, intensely practical question for you. TIPHANIE YANIQUE: Oh, it's such a pleasure, Scott. "Monster In The Middle" is the new novel from the acclaimed author of "Land Of Love And Drowning." Tiphanie Yanique joins us now from Atlanta, where she's a professor at Emory University. And in Tiphanie Yanique's new novel, they - and all of us - carry the strands and colors of forebears and former loves whose paths somehow deliver us to the time and place we meet one another or sometimes just walk away. Stela grew up a Catholic schoolgirl in the Caribbean. Fly, who was born with the name Earl, comes from a family with a multiplicity of religious influences. Fly Lovett is in grad school - music theory. Fly and Stela meet early in the pandemic lockdown. ![]()
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