In 2015, author Angela Flournoy published her debut novel, The Turner House. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award, and won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize. Since then, Flournoy has published nonfiction in The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker, among many other publications. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (of which she is an alumna), The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles. In 2025 she published her second novel, The Wilderness, a book that follows five women through twenty years of friendship—and all the attendant hardship, misunderstandings, joy, and change that come with moving from their twenties into their forties. The Wilderness was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and Flournoy will visit Pittsburgh on March 23 as part of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures series to discuss the book. Here, she talks with Pittsburgh author Anjali Sachdeva.
Sachdeva: The Wilderness is told from several points of view, and also jumps around in time within the twenty-year period it covers. You’ve got this group of friends going through their lives, and at various points we hear from each woman in the group. The Turner House takes a similar approach—we get the perspective of different family members. In both novels, I see you really resisting the idea of looking at any situation in one way. Can you talk about what is appealing to you in examining the same set of circumstances from different angles?
Flournoy: I think that’s really why I’m interested in multi-point-of-view novels in my first two books, this feeling that a story is a malleable thing. It changes depending on who is participating in it, and in the case of having a bunch of 3rd person points of view, who’s telling it. The characters are not […] untethered from other people. I often, very early in the process of creating these characters, think about ok well, what do other people think about them? What do they think about people who they love, and what are their histories with those people? And so for me, the next step that feels very natural is to then show some pivotal events from those people’s points of view.
I think it also has to do with my hesitancy to just claim that there is a single truth. That is not the same as arguing that there alternative facts, of course! But as far as a situation like ‘we don’t get along,’ there’s not a single truth to why two human beings don’t get along. And that’s also been something that is always very interesting to me. Perhaps it’s a factor to being a middle child. It’s the feeling of like, well, there are always a lot of stories around, and perspectives.
Sachdeva: “Polyphonic novel” has become the favorite way of describing this type of writing. I see you pushing the limits of that idea of polyphony. There are sections where, even for the same character, the voice will change depending on who they’re speaking to. Or for example, in the third section of the book a huge event has just happened, and one of the main characters, Desiree, starts out speaking in this very frantic voice that’s distinct from her regular voice. I’m curious how you came to those pieces of the book.
Flournoy: In any novel I try to make a decision about form that feels in line with content. In this book, part of the challenge was that I thought the content was one where, it’s a story about all of these people, it’s not about just one. And I tried to imagine what would it be like if I caught all of them in the same place at the same time and I asked them, what is the story of this friend group? It would not be chronological, and that’s why the book is not chronological. Someone might endeavor to begin at the beginning, but then somebody else would interject. They would have to go backward before they could go forward, and that’s what I wanted it to feel like when it was being read. But then I also thought that there are certain things that happen that do rupture your understanding, and I wanted to figure out a way to put that on the page. It’s not like I tried a bunch of different ways—I just kind of knew that this would be how I did it.
Sachdeva: As I read The Wilderness, one of the things I was interested in was the emphasis on place. Throughout the novel there’s a lot of description of the landscapes and culture of NY and LA, and a tension between them as they pull characters back and forth between coasts. Can you talk a little about how place works in your writing?
Flournoy: I sometimes joke that if I wasn’t a novelist I’d be a baker, but if I wasn’t a baker I would probably be a city planner. I’m really interested in cities particularly. I would like to say I’m interested in all place and all setting, but I do think there is a particular kind of way that cities, the way people organize themselves in cities, and the way that cities evolve and change over time is something I’m really interested in. It’s something I think about pretty early [in the writing process]. As much as I’m a character-driven writer, the people are always somewhere at the very beginning when I think about them.
Sachdeva: I know you worked on this book for about 10 years. What was your process like over that time? Were you working constantly, or stepping aside to do other projects? And also, because we as people change so much in 10 years, how did that influence the writing?
Flournoy: I’m going to answer your last question first. It really helped me in this case because when I began thinking about this in 2016, the goal was to cover two decades. And so taking a decade myself to write it, I was able to understand better. I had this ambition in my early 30s, when started writing this book, to write about entering middle age, but I hadn’t done it. And so taking so long that I actually did it myself, I think it made the book just better informed. That was not necessarily the goal at the beginning, but ending up that way I think was a positive.
I also wrote a television show that I sold to HBO, which they ultimately did not make. I was a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine for several years, I wrote a lot of nonfiction, I taught a lot. There was a period of time where I thought of those things as perhaps procrastinatory and not part of the central project of my life. And then I realized that a lot of an older generation of writers that I admired, like Baldwin and Sontag and Didion, they just wrote. They wrote nonfiction, they wrote fiction, they wrote poetry sometimes. I think some of these ways that we can think of our work as siloed and only one thing counting, they might have to do with the sort of the professional tracks one gets on if you get an MFA. Like, ‘those people are over there, but I’m over here.’ And that really freed me to think that it’s not like I hadn’t done anything in that decade. The number of revisions for the HBO show alone was more than a novel, which will never see the light of day, alas, but that was still helping me become a better writer.
Sachdeva: Had you done screenwriting before, or was that something new for you?
Flournoy: When I went to USC I was a traditional creative writing major, but I had an opportunity to take one screenwriting class. But that was many years prior. That was really one of the rewards of working on [the HBO] project, was that I got paid essentially to teach myself how to do this thing.
Sachdeva: What appealed to you about it? What was different about it that you enjoyed?
Flournoy: I think of myself as fairly economical as a writer, but it really pushes you to be even more so, to think differently about what is supposed to happen in a scene. I did not enjoy notes. You know, some of the notes are coming from people who are not writers, will never write but are thinking about the market. But they’re thinking about the market line by line: ‘this scene has to change because this will sell better.’ And that’s just, again…they say it’s a business, but that doesn’t make any sense. Nothing lives and dies by a scene like that, but there’s this way they are thinking about selling something. They’re also thinking about what kind of stars they can put in it: ‘Would this star ever be willing to do this scene? Oh, you can’t have this scene because this star would never want to do this.’ That has nothing to do with writing or storytelling, that has to do with trying to create a product. It’s not that I would never do it again, but it’s not necessarily as satisfying as writing fiction.
Sachdeva: I know you said you next book is going to be in part about being a parent. I’m wondering how becoming a parent has changed your writing, whether that’s about the writing itself or about the writing practice.
Flournoy: I think the biggest thing, to be honest, is that if I took however long I wanted to take to write a thing and sell a thing, the only person who was going to be impacted by that decision was me, before. And now, that’s not the case. So I just have become a lot less precious as far as I just have to write this thing, I have to do it in the time I have versus waiting until it seems like all of the circumstances have aligned. So that is probably the biggest difference, more than anything more romantic, just a financial pressure. But I think it’s a good pressure for me.
