Poured Over: Asale Angel-Ajani on A Country You Can Leave

Miwa Messer

“When you’ve been disappointed for that long in your life — what kind of people are you? What do you become?”

A Country You Can Leave, the debut novel from author Asale Angel-Ajani, is an unconventional family story following a Russian mother and Black, biracial daughter as they navigate class, trauma and relationships in California’s desert. Angel-Ajani joins us in conversation about discovering her characters, the portrayal of motherhood, her literary influences, and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. Listen after the episode for a TBR Topoff from Marc and Madyson.

Featured Books (Episode)
A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani
Strange Trade by Asale Angel-Ajani
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker
Another Country by James Baldwin

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.    

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and Asale Angel-Ajani has done a very cool thing, this debut novel— second book, and we’ll talk about the first book a little bit, probably, but second book, first novel, called A Country You Can Leave. Asale, I’m going to ask you to set up this because I mean, technically it’s a debut novel, yeah, second book, but is wildly different from your first book. So would you set it up for listeners, please?

Asale Angel-Ajani

I started writing this book when I was living in Hong Kong. So for me, I was homesick. I’d been living in Hong Kong for almost a decade and was sort of missing, believe it or not, life that I previously had experienced which took place in the California desert. And so I started writing and this book is a it’s a story of what I like to call an unconventional love story between a mother and a daughter. Probably, if we had to count it up in marriage terms, for example, like you’re with your partner for like, 12-13 years, you don’t really understand each other, you don’t even know if you really like each other, but somehow there’s love there. And that’s how I kind of see that the two of them Yevgenia is an accidental defector from the Soviet Union, this takes place in the early aughts, she is sort of brought into the white racial frame in the United States and she has this Black biracial daughter who is Afro Cuban and half Russian. They don’t know how to connect, the mother has very strong opinions about very specific things, but not very conventional when it comes to being a mother, so not necessarily maternal. They have more of a kind of frenemy kind of relationship, maybe, but there’s a lot of love there. And it’s also broadly about this, what I like to call a fugitive community in California, in this town that is unnamed, but we all know it’s sort of Inland Empire-esque. It’s really about this community of people who are living their lives on the edge, trying to make their way through, gentrification, poor paying jobs, and joy, trying to find their way to joy. So I think I’ll stop there.

But here’s the thing, when I saw the copy for the book, and I was like, wait a minute, we’re going to the desert, and I spent a fair amount of time in and around the California desert, so I know exactly where this book is set in, the kind of community that it’s set in. And I have to say, when you dropped a biracial kid and her immigrant mother, into this particular community, I was like, okay, okay, this is interesting. I was not expecting this. And then you kick us back 20 years, which I loved, because it takes out the internet and it takes out, I mean, a couple of adults have cell phones, but barely, we’re really, in this world with these people. And it’s a little relentless. It’s a little ruthless. You can feel the heat, you can feel the desert heat as you’re reading, which is no small thing and you’re telling me you were in Hong Kong when you started? What took you to Hong Kong?

It was a family move and then we sort of ended up staying and yeah, and it was great, I loved it. Miss it every day. But in terms of thinking about wanting to see aspects of your life represented, day to day, it was just it was it. I didn’t actually think I was going to publish this. So, I was just sort of writing for me and then it sort of just took over my life. Yeah, and then I was teaching in Hong Kong, I was teaching in a creative writing program and learned so much about how the world is shaped from a place that often does not get recognized in in geopolitics. So that also helped me in terms of thinking about this small place that doesn’t get recognized in the state of California. Now, of course, I have like nothing but longing now that I’m in New York, I have nothing but longing for Hong Kong.

I haven’t been to Hong Kong in a million years, but also just thinking about the climate and thinking about the energy of it, you couldn’t find two more disparate places on the planet really than the Inland Empire and Hong Kong If my arms were longer, we could we could show people exactly how different that is. The sense of place in A Country You Can Leave is so spot on. And I mean, the desert, and I like to go to the desert just a blow out the cobwebs and stare at the sky and you can’t really take anything too seriously when you’re in the desert. To think of these kids though and mom was on the run a little bit, they move from place to place, things don’t work out— men don’t work out, jobs don’t work. And here they are rolling up to the oasis in the desert and Lara is kind of looking at her mom and her mom’s kind of looking at her and they just from minute one, we know that this is not a conventional coming of age, and yet it really sits firmly in that kind of tradition of the kid leading with her chin. She’s not going to take the easy route. She’s not. Where did these women come from?

It’s funny because I love Yevgenia who is Lara’s mother and it’s so hard for me not to spend all of my writing space and time, thinking about her, writing about her. In fact, I had like, drafts upon drafts with just her. But she came from definitely parts of people that I know, and places within myself that I’ll say, places within myself that I value, but perhaps don’t let out very much. It’s not socially acceptable. So, I will say that she definitely came from a place that I knew pretty well.

The characters in this novel, too, there’s some neighbors that we meet, and a couple of Lara’s classmates I’m quite fond of, Julia and Charles, who are really, they’re great. They’re who they are. I mean, they’re just both handfuls in their own way. And there’s a party, that Lara and Charles go to that just goes off the rails, it just goes completely off the rails, because they’re basically sweet kids who are just completely out of their league, and they have these ideas of what they should do, to get out and how they can get out. And, you know, I’m gonna let readers enjoy the ride. But I’m very fond of these kids. So, let’s talk about structure and setup for a second, because you just said a minute ago, you weren’t going to publish this, you were just writing. So, let’s sit for a second with that idea. Because not many people say that.

My background is really academic in orientation, even though I’m trained in anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, Black Studies, all you know, ethnic studies, all of that, even though I love and value my biggest formation education came from novels and fiction. It’s not something that you know, academia in this proper venue, they don’t respect it, right. I think I’ve had colleagues say to me, must be really easy to write a novel, you’re like, “No, no, you try it.” I was pretty convinced that I was alone on this journey. And so I really just needed Yevgenia, Lara, Charles, Julie, Crystal to keep me company. But the more I wrote, the more I was completely obsessed with their lives— really, really in it, thought about them all the time, they would talk to me they I joke and say were the ones who really just— I would like, force people to say something on the page and they’d be like, “No way. Girl, this is not how we want to say that, you need to change it.” When I finally got it done. I was like, Okay, let me see. I don’t know. I kept one agent from my first book, and I sent it out to her and wasn’t too sure how people felt about it. And anyway, so long story short, it’s here. It’s coming out in a matter of weeks. So, I’m both nervous and thrilled that it’s off my plate. But um, Charles has been staying with me so he’s like part of the next project, which is like, bizarre but yeah, these characters haven’t left me fully yet.

Did you have Mama’s voice first? Did you have Yevgenia’s voice first, or did you have Lara’s. I’m just trying to do the math.

Yevgenia started as a completely separate project. I was kind of dabbling, part of what I was doing in Hong Kong was like trying to seek community, I needed and wanted friends. So I was like, I’m gonna take these writing workshops and see how it goes. And Yevgenia grew out of something entirely different and then Lara was a character, in something else that I was working on and I realized that neither one of them worked, but they worked together. And it made sense, because I think Yevgenia and Lara definitely, they do go together. Like they really are part of, not to be autobiographical, but it is part of my experience. They do go together; I was trying to keep them in totally separate rooms. I would say probably Yevgenia’s voice came first, which is part of— I want to go back to something that you said about the sort of coming-of-age story. Like there’s a part of me that feels like though it’s a coming-of-age story, in the sense that Lara is coming of age, she’s coming into her own, she’s sort of figuring out the world. One of the things that we understand, I think, I hope is that Yevgenia also is sort of coming of age too. I think that that’s not necessarily common. But it’s an important part to understand sort of an immigrant coming of age story, that it can happen. I mean, coming of age can happen at any time in our lives, and sometimes we have multiple, multiple coming of ages, if you will, so it felt like they both had something to contribute to that particular genre.

Well, especially too when you see Yevgenia goes back constantly to is what she reads for comfort, but she will read the same book in multiple language which that detail I love. She’ll read sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Russian, seems like she’s not a big fan of English translation. So she’s kind of like in whatever. But she does, she keeps grounding herself in what she knew before. And when she’s trying to talk to her kid about what she thinks her 16-year-old kid needs to know. It’s not just an immigrant parent talking to her teenage child, it’s “am I your peer, how do we fit?” I mean, I’m your mother, and you should be listening to me, but I don’t really want to be your mother. I mean, there’s always that undercurrent of, I didn’t ask for this, you’re here, I’m doing the best I can. She’s had a series of terrible jobs, she’s had a series of terrible partners and boyfriends or whatever you want to call them. I mean, she’s not had an easy go of things. And she knows it.

Yeah, she knows it and she sort of relishes in too, right. I mean, she’s a woman who can’t be contained in a lot of ways and, and sort of defies all sorts of boxes that one might put her in, including the maternal box, if you will. And so, I think that she’s… I hate saying, if you will, but whatever. But what was nice about her was that she, unlike other characters, including other characters in the book, she’s so wholly committed to her freedom, and her way of being in the world. That’s part of the reason why she was so refreshing to write and see the world through her particular perspective, because she just, she’s caring in certain ways, but also a hot mess and others and also really loving. But I think that what was important for me too, was that I didn’t mind, and I think it’s sort of true that the ambivalence of being a mother or being a parent, and she sort of approaches her life in that way or her relationship with her daughter in that way. They’re both ambivalent about each other. They don’t quite know what to make of each other except for when they’re incredibly pissed off and angry at each other. The point about the reading and the reading in multiple languages, one of the things that was really, really important for me was to think about and I think Yevgenia says something to this effect in book that, especially people who are deemed as having limited power, limited access, living in precarity, poor, however you want to put it, that people have rich inner lives, and I don’t think that we get to that too much. Which, in our kind of broader culture, you know, and so for me, it was really important to show that even so someone like Charles who is Lara’s best friend, he’s driven by his ambition. He’s incredibly ambitious, and kind of doesn’t want to see the limitations in front of them, right? And Lara’s all about limitations, right? She only sees limitations. So that to me was a little, I liked putting them together. And then, and then they’re all these other places where they clash. For variety of different reasons, you know.

The thing about Mom, we make so much space in literature and movies, and just culture and society, for bad dads and for dads to disappear and for dads who are not interested in parenting or emotionally connected. I think it’s fair to say that we make a lot of excuses. And yet for women, that’s kind of the final like, that’s the final insult. What do you mean, you don’t want to be a mother? What do you mean this is not second nature? What do you mean, this isn’t the only thing you think of in the morning, and the last thing you think of at night? Yevgenia is exactly that way, she tells you exactly who she is. She knows, she knows she’s messy. She knows whatever. I mean, she’s not lying to anyone.

And that’s the thing that was nice about her is that she’s, you know, there’s just no shame, right? Like, so Lara, I think Yevgenia calls her like, you know, some kind of Victorian or something to that effect. And, and she is I mean, to be 16 and to live with all those constraints is like, exhausting, right? But I think for Yevgenia she’s like, look, you know, this is it. And I think there’s sort of a, for lack of a better word, a sort of Russian realness there that is like part and parcel to who she is. But I think in terms of thinking about the mothering aspect and how culture is like, it’s weird, because we don’t, and I don’t mean to make this too pedantic or whatever. But, you know, from a class perspective, women who have disposable income can be as free as they want to be. But, if you’re a woman who does not have disposable income, and she’s a single mother, so she’s got this added burden. She refuses all of it, like she is going to be who she is, doesn’t matter if people say that she’s a terrible mother, and in some way, she’s not, right, because the one thing she is like 100% honest, even when it’s like a very harsh sort of honesty. But when I was in the early days, when I would workshop, these pieces, people would be like, Oh, my gosh, she’s so terrible. She’s so this, she said that now? Um, yeah. And it was it was sort of it was disheartening, because, you know, she’s complicated, we’re all complicated. But some of us have a little bit more like, we live our lives with stronger filters, or, you know, denser filters.

I think, also, she just never needed to have filters. I mean, the way they’re living, there’s a scene where they’re leaving her relationship in Mexico. And Lara really wants to stay and her mother’s like, No, we’re done. We’re done. This is all over. Like, we’re just going and Lara is looking or going, wait, I want to go to school. I want to live here. This is a nice house. This is a nice man. I want to stay. Her mother’s like, yeah, you know nothing we’re getting in the cab, we are going. And she’s never really put herself in a situation where she was forced to do that very polite, you know, head nodding, uh, yeah, we’ll get through. I mean, she forgets to show up with vaccination records for her kid and then forges them. And it she’s just kind of like, Alright, fine. I’ll do what you need me to do. So you can be somewhere but I’m not interested in rules. And I, you know, again, I think it’s kind of goes back to the fact that we judge women a little more harshly when they’re living like that, as opposed to well, if it were a dude, you’d be like, well, he can’t even make macaroni and cheese in the microwave. And it’s like, well, she should be able to keep the house clean and feed her kid and have a job. Like, the list goes on and on. And she’s just like, No, I read my books. I smoke my cigarettes, I drink, I go to work, I raise my kid, but she doesn’t always listen. And if she would just listen, her life would be easier.

Right. Like I have my set of rules that she needs to follow, that are completely unconventional in terms of thinking about like, don’t date men who talk too much or wear you know, gel in their hair or whatever her rules are, which are different than, you know, come home at 10. Or, be sure to tell people where you are or you know, whatever. She’s just not Interested in that she’s she sort of trust Lara in a way that parents don’t typically trust.

Lara has some moments through with her mother where she’s like, Yeah, I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for this. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to do it, which for a 16-year-old and you know the situation I’m referring to specifically, and we’re staying spoiler free in this conversation, so we’re not going to ruin it here. But I just laughed. I was like, that’s a 16-year-old who because she’s surrounded by chaos— Yeah, I get it. She wants to be a little bit of a Victorian she wants to be a little locked down because that’s the only control she has, right. Her mother is a chaos machine and not simply to be a chaos machine. Her mother doesn’t have the tools that her mother thinks she does. And some of those rules, though, are hysterical, especially like the gelled hair and whatnot. Because, you know, we all have our own little like, Oh, don’t cross that line. That’s the line I won’t cross because that means something I’m not prepared to accept. And I mean, I thought those little rules from her notebooks were very funny. I kept laughing I was like, Yep, I can totally see her saying, you know, dragging on the cigarette with her cheap vodka. And I can just, yep, scribbling away in those notebooks that follow them everywhere.

Yeah. The only real permanence that in the suitcase that they go in.

Can we talk about some of your literary inspirations? Because I feel like I’ve got some of them, but I don’t want to just spit them out. But let’s talk about some of the writers who helped make you the writer you are.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is such a tough question. Because I’m a kid who really, I mean, I literally, I grew up in the library. Reading and books were my companions. I also grew up much like Lara with a sort of very set of strict things about what I could read. So, for example, I think, right now I’ll say that Clarice, Clarice Lispector I’m looking over because that’s where the books are, I’m now reading the Hour of the Sun, which I am loving. And then I have other kind of like I mean, then there are books that stay with me that, that I just like, love, love, love. Adore, adore adore. Breyten Breytenbach has this memoir, I think it’s the second volume, it’s the True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. He’s a South African writer, and it’s about his perspective, from the time that he was held in prison for his anti-apartheid activities. It’s a beautiful book, because it both sort of bridges poetry and narrative and, you know, inner narrative. Then there’s Alice Walker The Temple of My Familiar, which is an incredible book. But my literary inspirations, I think, are kind of all over the place. So, I have, you know, James Baldwin, for nonfiction, and then Another Country, which is like, you know, the novel that sort of also helped anchor me with this novel. And then there’s the trilogy that that I think I might refer to in this in this book, I have like Alda Merini, who is an Italian poet. My tastes are sort of all over the map. Tolstoy is, early his first collection, his first trilogy that he wrote, I actually wanted to try to model this on that, but then it just became too unwieldy. And I wasn’t going to, because I was sort of thinking, well, what would it look like to have a Black working class or poor, young woman sort of reframe this idea of like, childhood youth? And you know, like, his first his first sort of collection of, of books? Well, yeah,

I do know what you’re talking about and all of a sudden, I just thought, Wait, does this mean you’re working on a sequel? I think Lara ultimately, is going to have a really interesting life. And I don’t know what that means. You know, we know what happens to the other kids, right? I mean, here’s Julie comfortable as all get out driving her fancy car and everything else. And she’s like, Yeah, I’m not a student. I cannot wait to be done. Like you can’t make me. And here’s Charles, who, you know, I think the world is not fully prepared for Charles, but Charles is ready to hit the world. And that’s going to be exciting to see, but part of me she, I mean, one I’m very fond of Lara. And yes, I’m talking about a fictional character, like she’s just down the street, but whatever. But she has a little bit of an old soul and yet she is such a 16-year-old and she just doesn’t. I mean, here’s this kid who just doesn’t have anyone really to model herself on because her mother is just who she is. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think mom is a great character. I think she’s just really honest and really clear about who she is, and how she’s hoping to help her kid and her kid doesn’t see it that way, her kids just like you’re a weirdo. You’re such a weirdo. I don’t know what to do with you. And I don’t know, I think Lara could have a really interesting life, we’ll see. But I want to go back to your first book for a second, because it’s nonfiction. It is very intense. It is sitting next to A Country You Can Leave; I would not have expected the person who wrote A Strange Trade to have written this particular book. I mean, there’s a little bit of a larger geopolitical world happening in A Country You Can Leave, but at the same time, can we talk about that first book because also your day job is very intense, your areas of study are very intense. And really, again, like I can see hints of them in this book, but how did the two connect? How did you do it?

So the first book, Strange Trade, which is narrative nonfiction, is a book about women that I worked with who were trafficking drugs, kind of all over the world, but I met them in Italian prison, and did many, many just years of research. And a lot of, you know, I’m a trained anthropologist, so I did an ethnography working in the prisons, and just sort of figuring out their lives. That piece came from the fact that my father also was a drug trafficker in California, and also went to prison. So I never knew my father much. Never. Yeah, so I think that my interest in sort of the field of carceral studies or the criminal legal system comes from my own personal experience, having grown up being a child whose parents spent time, my mother spent time in jail, my dad was in prison. When I had the opportunity to look at these things more broadly, I went elsewhere to see what those systems were like. And I’ve spent a lot of my professional life looking at the global carceral system to see how things are done, what can be done different, if at all. I have also a special interest also in you know, drug trafficking too, but I think it’s, I think some of that that kind of drug fugitive, that life kind of filters through the Oasis, I think is pretty common, actually. And so that that becomes part of the, the narrative in the novel, but, but I decided to kind of stay away from that since I’ve already written about it.

Yeah, but that description used earlier, fugitive community, I mean, it’s so good, and it’s so like, even Charles’s aunt who has raised him from childhood, in her velour sweatsuit watching her Korean dramas, with the sound all the way up and the subtitles because she doesn’t speak Korean but needs to listen to full blast. Okay. It seems like all of these people may have had options at one point. I’m going to take Charles out of that, we’re going to take Lara out of it, because Lara could end up doing some stuff. But even Julie, who could technically has options does not, because she doesn’t want to. She just kind of wants to hang out and be left alone and go shop. That’s really kind of all she wants to do. And the adults are either stuck just on the survival level. Or they’ve made it out like Julie’s parents are fine. They’re fine. They live in their gated community, they’re fine. But Charles’ aunt is just like, this is my life.

Yeah. And I will say my sister and I were joking about this because my grandmother, actually that is like a scene straight from my experience because that’s my grandmother, right?

She’s totally great. And you know, she’s doing the best she can. She does have a couple of moments where she says some stuff. The adults in this book frequently say some stuff where you’re like, oh, yeah, okay. People think that it’s just who they are. And I do appreciate how organic, all of that is because I mean, there is a danger to when you’re working with stories about class and race, and identity. Sometimes we slip, sometimes we’re trying to make more of a point than let the characters who they are. And one of the things I really enjoyed, while I was reading A Country You Can Leave was the fact that these people felt very real to me— and occasionally irritating. I’m not going to pretend there weren’t times where I was like, you know, as much as I like Yevgenia, there were times where I was like, oh, Lord, I’m so glad you’re not my mother. I’m so glad, fictional character, you are not my mother, because you are tiresome. And then two seconds later, should just do something and you’re like, yep, yep. No wonder your kid has whiplash. No wonder your kid is a 90-year-old, 16-year-old.

Right. Right. It’s funny, I felt that way kind of also about Lara. Because I mean, the people that in the novel that I find to be for me, kind of, like the space that, that held me the most actually are the support around Lara, because I do think that it’s not a mannered book. Like it’s not a book of manners and, people are truly who they are. And I honestly, I have to say that when I was writing, there’s sometimes when I like had to shut Yevgenia down, I mean, it wasn’t pleasant, but I also thought somebody called it like, grit realism or something. And I’m like, I don’t know, if I don’t appreciate, I mean, whatever. I appreciate anyone who reads this. So, thank you. But I don’t know if I would call it that. But I get the sort of lean in that direction. I understand. But I do think that it’s not a book of manners. I hope, you know, even as you might have been annoyed, that there might have been places where you’re like, oh, yeah, I understand that sentiment, or I understand where she’s coming from, or I feel that too, in a certain way.

You know, I felt like I hadn’t read this book before. That was the thing I was looking for more than I think, because I mean, and I’m using coming of age very loosely. I mean, again, like you can have a coming-of-age story and someone’s 70 and they’re finally getting a clue. But as a shorthand, it’s helpful, in some ways, because it’s also something to push against, right? Like, you can have a million different kinds of actually, I’m looking at The Book of Goose over my shoulder and I’m like, that’s a wild, wild, wild story of adolescence To me, to be able to deconstruct, sort of what’s put out there in the world as a coming of age, why can’t it be a coming of age and an immigrant story and a class… Or like, why can’t it just be all of the things? Why can’t it just be these characters that I don’t want to leave and yet grit lit is… I know people like to use it. I personally, it doesn’t, it’s a shorthand that’s not particularly useful for me. What’s more important to me is this world that you’ve built, and how you keep sort of chipping away at everyone’s expectations. And everyone like Charles ends up having a very nice relationship about book with Yevgenia, and I was not fully expecting that, but it makes perfect sense that they’re the ones that would gravitate to each other. Because he knows that books are a way out and yet, books were not necessarily a way out for her the way she thought they would be. I mean, she clearly thought she had a big life ahead. This was not her plan. No trailer park was not her plan. The running from multiple men may be part of the plan but higher quality men than some of the men she’s run from.

You know, Yevgenia is a woman whose schemes just didn’t quite land her in the places that she thought they would. And Lara is sort of on the one hand kind of along for the ride as sometimes kids, are. parents are sort of you know, kind of just floating through the world without an actual, you know, kind of living their life, if you will. But I do think that Charles and Yevgenia’s relationship also sort of surprised me. I didn’t. I mean, at one point when Charles is at their house and Yevgenia shows up. And Lara’s like, oh, no, my covers going to be blown. I realized that I couldn’t keep them apart anymore because the two of them, because Charles is a schemer in a different sort of way, right? I mean, he’s someone who has big hopes and dreams that may actually come true in a way that Yevgenia just couldn’t and I think in part that plays to this idea of like, the different ways we think about power, like how is power sort of delineated, even among people who don’t seem to have power, right? You know, it means something that Yevgenia comes to the US as a single young woman who, at least these are all the back pages that didn’t get in the book who didn’t speak English very well who, you know, spoke English enough, but having lived in Italy before and came without a network came without friends and family. That all of that means that she’s had to start at a very different place than say, Charles is, he gets in this particular moment, though he’s queer and he’s Black, he has people who believe in him. Like, if any, if anyone’s going to make it out, it’s going to be Charles.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt. I hope he doesn’t decide to pick up a British accent again, because I was just like, oh, kid. You been watching too much television? I just, that whole thing? I think readers are going to be really tickled when they see that because he just he opened and you’re like, okay, kid, that’s your choice. Okay, Rock on. Here we go. Don’t forget to take your shoes off. Now, there are some really, I mean, I have to say, it’s important to remember that there are genuine moments of joy and connection. And I think the connection piece is hard for a lot of your characters, because none of them wants to be vulnerable. I mean, not even Julie who’s like, I am not the sharpest tool in the shed, I just want to live my life. But none of them wants to be vulnerable, none of them wants to be really genuinely intimate with another person.

Yeah, I think that’s because the subtext and all of that is that they’ve been, all of them have been hurt in different ways and people have just, I mean, and I think this is true, when you get to when you live in a particular sort of frame, on a on the edge, you’ve been disappointed often by parents or by the state by the schools. And so, that level of, of vulnerability that isn’t that nobody really wants to display at certain points, they do come out, but not without a fight.

Not without a fight and it doesn’t seem like it brings relief to those characters when it’s happening, in some ways, they’re ill equipped, and in other ways they know how to survive, in ways the rest of us don’t. It’s a life that I think you recognize the emotional honesty and the emotional truth, but at the same time, I think for the majority of us to try and live like some of these characters, I think it would be really challenging. I think it would just, there’s a level of intensity and a level of armor in a way, where, you know, lots of us don’t have to live that way.

No, no, we don’t. I mean, I think that that’s the good fortune of fortune, maybe, I don’t know. I mean, I think their form of vulnerability may, in fact be things that we don’t easily recognize, right? Like, I think about this scene between Charles and Crystal and Lara, and they’re all sort of, Lara and Charles are sort of, dissing each other, for lack of better word, just really laying into each other, but it’s a form of play and it’s a form of joy and a form of love too because they can say things to each other without meaning them but also meaning them and also having that reflect back to themselves. And then Crystal is someone who is incredibly, you know, at the moment incredibly vulnerable and can’t seem to, you know, enter into this this space, but she needs care and then she eventually gets it, right, in a certain weird sort of way. I think that it did teach me a lot too, about like, different edges of society and culture and how we sort of manage disappointments. And when you’ve been disappointed for that long in your life? How, what kind of people are you? What do you become?

Can I ask what’s next? Are you working on the next thing now?

I’m actually working on, I have the next piece is, its narrative, its narrative nonfiction. It’s an essay collection that sort of takes some of these themes a little bit, sending them out more broadly, it’s sort of a cultural history, about intimate relationships. There’s a chapter on white mothers, for example. But looking at the whole frame, that’s actually supposed to be coming out sometime next year, I think, in 2024. And then I’ve got two novels on deck. And one, like I mentioned is really centered on Charles and his aunt, which is sort of, I’m excited about it, because it’s definitely it plays to all the humorous aspects that I had to tamp down that didn’t exist between each other. But it’s an intergenerational story that addresses issues of gentrification and failed ambition.

I really, really, I mean, I’m looking forward to the essay collection, please don’t misunderstand me, but that not I really want to read that novel. I really, really, really, I just feel like, Auntie has some stuff going on, that we do not know about. And Charles wouldn’t be Charles, if he didn’t have a very special backstory. And sometimes special backstories can also just be wildly ordinary, but you get a kid like him out of it. So that’s why I’m sort of my eyes are getting excited about this idea. Because he is that kid. And you know, when he finally gets into his boss Scout t shirt, you’re like, Okay, you’ll be fine. Okay, because I had a moment with the outfits and the accents and everything else. And I was like, Oh, is he gonna be that? He’s not that kid. He’s super not that kid. I just, I hope people understand to A Country You Can Leave, It’s just a really special book. It’s a really special book and the characters I again, I haven’t seen characters like this. You don’t get a lot of 90 year old 16 year olds. Yeah, you just don’t and mom and everything else. It’s just, there’s, there’s some stuff that happens in A Country You Can Leave. That’s pretty great. A lot of fun to read.

Well, thank you so much, thanks for reading it. And thanks for having me on. I really, really appreciate it. Like I said, I’m a listener, so I’m totally thrilled.

That’s, you know, honestly, I’m so happy to know that we can connect with people when we do this kind of thing, because sometimes it’s weird talking into the Zoom screen and you’re like, Alright, I guess it’s this. Asale Angel-Ajani, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, A Country You Can Leave is out now. And I really, really, really cannot wait for listeners to meet Lara and her mom and the whole gang. Thanks again.

Thank you so much.

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