So a draft of the book came together in about three weeks. But I do consider that my first foray into the world of the book.Īnd then when I sat down to write the book, I had already had this preliminary experience inside of the voice of the book, and it came very easily. I probably did it for four or five weeks. It's not an exercise that I kept up for very long. So I made this second Twitter account that summer, and when I was commuting on the subway, I would write sentences and I would try and establish a sense of how the book sounded, what these people looked like, what they sounded like, what their names were, what the voice of the novel was going to be. I could use Twitter almost the way a writer would use a notebook. And that I could use Twitter instead of as a way to air my kind of nonsense observations of daily life, I could use it with a particular goal in mind. You're sending communiques out into the void.
And at some point I realized that tweeting is actually just a form of writing, right?. It is nighttime there in this place where they ought not to be and they're not expecting to confront people in the middle of the night on their doorstep. It's an uncomfortable place to be because they're acknowledging some very deep and unflattering preconceptions based on race. But this liberal white couple is then forced to confront the fact that their immediate presumption is that this Black couple who show up on their doorstep must somehow be criminals, that they must be lying, that they couldn't possibly have a house this nice because they are Black.Īmanda reflects at one point that they look like they could be the handyman and the maid associated with the house and that maybe this whole thing is just a con. The reader is meant to feel a bit of discomfort there because, of course, a knock at the door late at night in a place where you're not expecting to be, it feels suspicious, it feels threatening. On the novel's opening chapters, in which the white family who is renting the house opens the door in the middle of the night to an older Black couple who claim to be the home's owners
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