Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel's Heroine Wants Something Else. - The New York... - 0 views
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Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else
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In her historical novel, “Libertie,” she focuses on a Black woman who doesn’t yearn to be the first or only one of anything.
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Kaitlyn Greenidge learned about the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York. “I filed it away and thought, if I ever got a chance to write a novel, I would want it to be about this,” she said.
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Libertie, the rebellious heroine of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, comes from an extraordinary family, but longs to be ordinary.
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As a young Black woman growing up in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie is expected to follow in the footsteps of her trailblazing mother, a doctor who founded a women’s clinic.
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I wanted to explore is, what’s the emotional and psychological toll of being an exception, of being exceptional, and also, what about the people who just want to have a regular life and find freedom and achievement in being able to live in peace with their family — which is what Libertie wants?”
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“If you come from a marginalized community, one of the ways you are marginalized is people telling you that you don’t have any history, or that your history is somehow diminished, or it’s very flat, or it’s not somehow as rich as the dominant history.”
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They are engaged in ongoing conversations about their writing, though they draw the line at reading and editing drafts of one another’s work.
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The novel has drawn praise from writers like Jacqueline Woodson, Mira Jacob and Garth Greenwell, who wrote in a blurb that Greenidge “adds an indelible new sound to American literature, and confirms her status as one of our most gifted young writers.”
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Greenidge and her sisters developed a reverence for storytelling and history early on, when their parents and grandparents would tell stories about their ancestors and what life was like during the civil rights movement.
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“That fracture was really formative for me,” she said. “It made me hyper aware of inequality and the doublespeak that goes on in America around the American dream and American exceptionalism, because that was proven to me not to be true.”
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Greenidge was collecting stories from people whose ancestors had lived there, and tracked down a woman named Ellen Holly, who was the first Black actress to have a lead, recurring role on daytime TV, in “One Life to Live.”
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Greenidge filed the family’s saga away in her mind, thinking she had the premise for a novel. When she got a writing fellowship, she was able to quit her side jobs and immerse herself in the research the novel required.
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The resulting story feels both epic and intimate. As she reimagined the lives of the doctor and her daughter, Greenidge wove in other historical figures and events.
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In one horrific scene, Libertie and her mother tend to Black families who fled Manhattan during the New York City draft riots.
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Her daughter, Mavis, was born days after she finished a second draft of the book, and is now 18 months old. She finished revisions while living in a multigenerational household with her own mother and sisters.