KG: Actually, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter on the day I handed in my first draft of this book, and she was born three days after I handed in the second draft. She has really grown up with this book along the way. But I did think a lot about what it means to be a mother, and the expectations of the role, both internal and external, and I thought a lot particularly about Black motherhood. Probably one of the most famous novels that explores what it is to be a Black mother in America is Beloved. That novel didn’t really influence this one, but what did were a lot of Toni Morrison’s interviews in which she talks about motherhood as a form of freedom, particularly for Black women. She says that Black women don’t get to really self-actualize in this country, but through the care and raising of our children, getting to decide how they are going to live their days, what we impart to them, what we want them to value, we can really exorcise and imagine other worlds.

That sort of alternate take was really refreshing because so much of the literature around motherhood is that it’s drudgery, it’s awful, it’s the patriarchy killing us, our bodies are dying, who would want to do it, this is for suckers. I tried to read as much as I could, not just for myself but also for the characters of Libertie and her mother, Dr. Sampson. I tried to read women whose ambition was not thwarted by motherhood, or who at least didn’t credit motherhood with thwarting their ambition, like Morrison, Grace Paley, Lynn Nottage. There are writers out there who make this point, and I wanted to explore that side of motherhood as another form of literary creation but also as intellectual creation, and this very deep relationship you have to someone where you are shaping and developing them and eventually exchanging and sharing ideas.

LB: Naming is another essential piece of motherhood. Your choice of the name Libertie is obviously deeply symbolic, but many other names in the book—Experience, Emmanuel, Ben Daisy—are also unique. Was the process of coming up with these names meaningful for you? How did you think of them?

KG: It was different for each character. For [Libertie’s college friends] Experience and Louisa, I was reading one slave narrative where they were talking about all the different names that this family of fourteen had. Some of them were biblical and some of them were obviously words they had picked out from either the Bible or some place that just struck them, things that we don’t normally name people. And with Black people and naming, of course, it’s a really fraught history in the US. When we name ourselves, we are often ridiculed for it, but we come up with absolutely beautiful names for ourselves and we have throughout our time here. I really liked that part of it.