On the Cape Coast Castle, and the inspiration for Homegoing:

“I was immediately struck by how these Ghanaian women could be upstairs walking around oblivious to what was going on underneath them. I knew pretty much immediately that that was what I wanted to write about in some capacity, but it took me a while to get there.”

On structure:

“The structure was the hardest part by far. When I say that I started in 2009, I probably didn’t land on the structure until 2012. It took me a long time to figure out what I really wanted to do.”

“I had always known that I wanted to write about the wife of a British soldier, and a woman who’s kept in the castle as a slave. That was the genesis of this book. I knew, also, that I wanted to end up in the present…For everything else, I let myself be led.”

As I was writing, I told myself that with each chapter, I didn’t want to give too much weight to any one character. In terms of length, I wanted them to be similar. Twenty to thirty pages, I think, was the limit that I gave myself as I was writing, and some were a little longer and some were a little shorter.

“But I kind of wanted them to all feel equally weighted, though I know when you’re reading, readers are going to connect with different characters.”

On research:

“A lot of the books that I was reading were written by British men. I felt like I had to piece together the other side of the story based off of this one side, which was the only side to have a voice. That was hard for those earlier chapters.”

“For me, I wanted the research to feel atmospheric, really backgrounded, as though it was informing the characters’ lives but not crushing them. I wanted the characters to be the main focus in the foreground of this.”

On process:

“For me, when I write… I know everybody’s different, but for me, it’s a pretty slow process and I read my sentences a million times. I’ll write a sentence and then I’ll read it like five times and then I’ll change one word and then I’ll read it aloud another five times and then I’ll add another sentence.”

Read the interview here.

Photo by Michael Lionstar