JONES WRITES her first drafts on a typewriter from the small fleet she owns.
She speaks in an intimate voice that makes people want to lean in close and listen to every word. And they do. They listen hard. When Tayari Jones RI ’12 read from her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (Warner Books, 2002), at the Radcliffe Institute’s black history celebration, even the notoriously creaky floor in the Radcliffe Gym kept quiet
when a man is exonerated and released from prison after seven years and returns home to his wife, Celestial, who thought he was gone forever. Tayari Jones knows how to hook an audience, not unlike the great Toni Morrison, her favorite writer, who also reads in a let-me-tell-you-asecret voice. Jones has been on a roll lately, with the success of her third novel, Silver Sparrow, a story about two young girls who have the same father but different mothers. It was widely and well reviewed—the Village Voice, for example, wrote that Jones is “fast defining middleclass black Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester.” And Silver Sparrow was named one of the best books of 2011 by Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Library Journal. But it wasn’t always thus. Jones
sometimes bumpy road to success. during a haunting passage about a fifth grader living through the Atlanta child murders that occurred from 1979 to 1981, when Jones herself was growing up in Atlanta. Later in the year, when Jones gave her fellow’s presentation—the debut reading from her novel-in-progress, “Dear History”—the Radcliffe Gym was once again hushed as she read about what happens
Photographs by Kathleen Dooher
has traveled a long, sometimes bumpy road to get where she is today. After publishing her second novel, The Untelling (Warner Books, 2005), Jones wrote a partial manuscript of Silver Sparrow, which her agent sent around to publishers in hopes of landing a contract. “It was rejected all over town,” Jones says. “Not so much because anyone hated the book, but because I was not seen to have a big enough name. The third book is the hardest to publish. On your first book, you’re a creature of your publisher’s imagination. They think you could be the next whatever they need another one of. When it turns out you’re not, they say, well, we’ll do the next one and recoup what we put out for the first one. Then, on the third one, you often find yourself looking for a new publishing home.” Jones was so disheartened that she didn’t work on the book for a year. “It’s unusual for me not to work on a book for
Summer 2012 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
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