Haili Blassingame

And I think when you have someone you look up to and you see them around your age, it can be a quiet sort of,

intense emotional experience so i think i wanted to show us that janine had always been confident like you know she didn't change but also what she would have been up against in the 70s as a black writer and how that has shaped her into the type of teacher she is now so it's sort of a little bit of an origin story i also wanted to the other thing with the when you when you're online you're getting these little clips and they're out of context too so i think with this it's like

you would see her, you would see this confident woman smoking in bow sleeves.

But there's almost always some sort of sad story behind these clips where you find out, like, I mean, Zora Neale Hurston is an example where you find out they died, you know, in poverty.

You know, it's never that clip.

And so I think

having her watch that video and feel like a sense of pride and connection and then finding out the story behind, you know, the story that you see made it the most impactful.

And also, you know, being a young Black writer herself and like already feeling unsure about, you know, what is the point of me writing the story?

And that was the reality for, you know, many writers who some who we don't have, we wouldn't have heard of at all.

So.

Thank you.

quince.com slash tease not y'all well I think I had a lot of practice I think it helped having written the modern love essay with such blindness because I got a lot of online hate from that and I was I kept like stumbling into things like not even understanding the scope of things and I think with the novel was the same thing where like I don't see her as unlikable I mean now I'm getting reviews where people found her challenging and I'm like she's fun to me but I don't know maybe my definition of unlikable is different from everyone's

So I actually didn't think about how do I make her likable?

Because to me, likable is interesting.

So I don't want to read a character about a character who goes to church every week and does everything for charity.

Unless there's like some secret evil that they're hiding and that's why they're doing it.

But if it's literally just that, that's not interesting to me.

And I think fiction has a certain imperative to go certain places in the psyche.

Like...

You know, just because someone does something in a novel doesn't mean I think they should do it in real life.