After signing 3,720 books in a matter of weeks, Tayari Jones has a few tips for other authors.
“You really just have to follow the same rules as in the rest of your life,” says Jones, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. “Don’t do everything in a day. Take breaks.”
She recruited friends to pull away single sheets from stacks of stand-alone title pages as she signed them. Later, these were bound into copies of “Kin,” her fifth book, just published by Penguin Random House.
“The novel is having a pretty big rollout,” she says, referring to the book’s three-month, 24-city tour. “And that can be very isolating. So, you’ve got to figure out ways to bring friends in so that it’s their moment, too.”
Friendship takes center stage in “Kin,” which is set in rural Louisiana and Atlanta during the mid-20th century. The book’s chapters alternate points of view between Annie and Niecy, two motherless friends whose lifelong bond is tested by the years, geography and class shifts.
“Kin” is an Oprah’s Book Club pick. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly pronounced it a “tour de force," while Kirkus called the book “beautifully written and powerfully compelling.”
Jones’ previous novel, “An American Marriage,” a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones is also the author of “Leaving Atlanta,” “The Untelling” and “Silver Sparrow.”
Appreciation for each reader
Jones began “Kin” by going back to a practice that brought her joy as a child — writing with pencil on lined paper.
She says novelist Ann Patchett once told her: “When you sign a book, someone has paid for a signed book. They need to be able to read that signature.”
Early in her career, Jones remembers a promotional bookstore visit where no one showed up. While she signed books for the store to sell later, she says, “an African American woman came in with her little boy.” The mother apologized for being late; she’d driven from the next town because she wanted her child to see a book signing.
“And so, I said, ‘Well, tomorrow, I’m actually going to be in your town, and I will reserve a seat right up front for you and your son.’ That’s the person for whom you want a lovely, legible signature,” says Jones.
She cherishes her readers because they fueled what she calls the “slow-burn” growth of her career over 25 years.
“My little prayer [at book events] used to be, ‘Oh, please let me get into the double digits,’” she recalls. “I will never value readers less because there aren’t more of them.”
Jones experienced something very different at the book launch for “Kin,” which sold out Atlanta’s 800-plus seat Rialto Theater.
Still, she says, “If you have a book event where three people come, you need to look at each of those three people like, ‘Hello, friend.’ Because each one got up, got dressed, put on some clothes and got in the car. That’s a gift.”
A strange journey
Writing “Kin” was wildly different from composing her previous novels. “It was a very strange journey,” says Jones. “And I kind of don’t want it to happen like this again!”
She was contracted to write a different book — a contemporary novel about gentrification set in modern-day Atlanta. But as she sat down at her desk, day after day, something felt off.
“I was getting words down,” she recalls, “but it felt almost like I was in an arranged marriage. It made perfect sense for me and this book to be together, but we just didn’t vibe.”
Jones was struggling to write this story during 2020 and 2021, when “people were out there protesting the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks,” she says. “And I’m up in my comfortable, cozy office, doing what?”
Finally, she went back to the practices that brought her joy as a child: She sharpened a pencil using a manual, turn-crank sharpener. Then she set its point to some lined paper. “It was just for the pleasure of writing,” she says, “to see what was on my mind.”
The characters who arose lived in the 1940s and ’50s in the Jim Crow South. At first, she assumed these must be the parents of the characters in her novel. But as time passed and the pages accumulated, she says she realized, “Perhaps this is not backstory. Perhaps this is the story.”
It felt like magic. “And I don’t like magic,” says Jones.
“While I’m not a writer who has to be in complete control or know where a story’s going, I have always rolled my eyes at people who claim, ‘Oh, the story just came to me.’ And now, here I am, among them!” she says, laughing.
As each draft of “Kin” brought new details to light, her characters came to feel like people she knows. One of those people was a freewheeling young man named Clyde.
“When he has a little money in his pocket, Clyde buys pre-made, store-bought cigarettes and lets them burn down in an ashtray so people know he has money,” says Jones. “And that also just shows you how little they have, that this is such an extravagance. When those details come, they tickle me.”
Jones wrote the book while recovering from an episode of Graves disease, an autoimmune disorder whose symptoms include fatigue, hand tremors and vision problems.
“I had to write the book with an eye patch on,” she says. “So here I am, looking like a pirate. And the characters really kept me company. Dear Clyde — I owe him one!”
The book also took on themes she wasn’t expecting to explore. Its two protagonists are raised by an aunt and a grandmother, neither of whom warm to the role of caregiver.
“I hadn’t thought about the trickle-down effects of whether or not people can control their own fertility,” says Jones. “It affects the whole culture as well as the lives of children reared by mothers who are not in the mood to do so. A child’s need is for full motherhood, and it wasn’t available to Annie or Niecy.”
Treating writing with respect
It wasn’t until college that Jones learned putting words on paper could be more than a hobby.
“When girls like to read and write,” she says, “people don’t necessarily believe they’re intellectual. They believe they are nice. People are like, ‘Oh, great. Keep that reading and writing going.’ But no one says, ‘You may become an important voice.’”
Meeting Pearl Cleage changed that for her. The writer and playwright taught Jones at Spelman College. One day, Cleage asked her student what she was thinking.
Jones recalls starting to speak. “And she says, ‘No, don’t tell me. Write it down.’ And with that, she became my first audience. She took me seriously and taught me to take myself seriously.”
She treats her own students with the same respect.
“Here at Emory, we have an undergraduate creative writing program,” Jones says, “and you know, I was an undergraduate when Pearl shone her light on me, so I take undergraduate education very seriously. I love teaching the writers who are on the verge of finding their voices.
“I say to the students, ‘Our goal is that every person who brings their work to class leaves eager to write another draft,’” she says. “I don’t want to gatekeep. I want writing to seem like a normal thing that lots of people can do. The more stories, the better.”
Watch as Oprah Winfrey surprises Tayari Jones with the selection of “Kin” as the first Oprah’s Book Club pick of 2026. Hear their conversation about the book as they talk with an audience of readers in New York City.