As you were creating plot and working through drafts, how do you choose what doors to open and where to get close without stepping through?Īsali Solomon: Somebody was describing the book as being about a bunch of almosts, things that almost happen. Kenya explores the spaces between certainty, such as the threat of molestation from her stepfather Teddy, and we’re with her as she makes decisions that affect not only her but also the many circles that compose her community. The Rumpus: Your novel Disgruntled beautifully contrasts a series of events that develop to fruition with those that flirt only with the possibility of culmination. A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” writer and winner of the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Foundation Award, Solomon speaks here to the influence of an outsider identity, the mythology of memory and place, and reminds us that there’s a lot more to Pennsylvania than the City of Brotherly Love. And while the language of survival is vastly personal, one needs only be willing to say “I am not who I once was” to find meaning in this exceptionally smart bildungsroman. Though of an era past, Asali Solomon’s work speaks to the universal troubles we experience as emergent adults in a world of continuously reordered structure and increasing complexity.

With Kenya’s increasing disillusionment comes the addition of a coy stepfather and a series of near encounters that threaten to crack the foundation of the independent self she has worked tirelessly to forge. Kenya, plucked from her home in West Philadelphia after a life-altering incident, navigates grief and guilt amidst new surroundings of privilege, racial whitewashing, and the sudden absence of her father. It proves that, while our families define the early years of our life and influence our decisions as adults, they are but the groundwork for us to claim our own mistakes for the sake of forging an identity.ĭropping us immediately into the late ‘80s world of young Kenya Curtis, Solomon weaves an intricate tale in four segments that span the distinct regions of Pennsylvania as well as the unique cornerstones of adolescent development. Asali Solomon’s debut novel Disgruntled (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) unpacks and explores this idea. The same may be said of humans-that only when we are deeply familiar with a new friend or foe may we start to understand the impact and effects of that person’s family, environment, and personal experience. In the moments we begin to read a story for the very first time, it is utterly impossible to know where an author’s influences and aspirations lie.

Disgruntled by asali solomon