Roy’s incarceration sets the scene for a complex, heartbreaking love story that navigates fidelity, obligation and the weight of the past. Suddenly, one year into their marriage, Roy is convicted of a crime they both know he didn’t commit. With her latest novel, An American Marriage, Tayari Jones immerses readers in the inner worlds of Celestial and Roy – an ambitious newlywed African American couple on the brink of a promising future together.
spoke with Jones over the phone in anticipation of the book’s release on February 6.‘I know you’re innocent, there is not one doubt in my mind, but I also know that you’re not here.’ The ways in which this tragedy shapes their relationship, moving them in surprising directions, is only the start of what’s in store for readers of this rich, complex novel. In An American Marriage, which Oprah Winfrey just selected as her next book club pick, Jones writes about Roy and Celestial, a bright young African-American couple whose lives are turned upside down when Roy is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The dogged determination and stick-to-itiveness that has defined much of Jones’s career is also typical of her characters.
After inquiring about her novel, the executive asked, “But how do you know Judy?” Jones’s admirer had been none other than literary icon Judy Blume. The admirer introduced Jones to an executive at Algonquin Books, which would go on to publish Silver Sparrow and Jones’s latest book, An American Marriage. I couldn’t face them every day if I were to give up on that project.” She finally completed the manuscript with the help of a grant from the United States Artists later, at a reading in Florida at the Key West Literary Seminar, an admirer came up to Jones to express outrage that she still didn’t have a publisher. “The only reason I kept working on Sparrow was because I tell my students that you write a book for you and not your publisher. At the time, she had begun work on a new novel, which would eventually become the best-selling Silver Sparrow. Her sales numbers were hardly strong-in fact, she says, she had become “radioactive.” “I was so depressed,” Jones, 47, says. IN 2009, four years after the release of her second novel, The Untelling, Tayari Jones found herself without a publisher.
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