Guernica has just published a great interview with Ayana Mathis, who has just published her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, to great popular and critical success. The whole transcript is worth the read, but my favorite parts were Mathis’s descriptions of writing minority characters without burdening them with representation. She explains:

My book has a pre–civil rights setting with a post–civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called “The Black Experience,” though undoubtedly there was one once. In the book I have a character called Lawrence say that he doesn’t want Hattie to be just another downtrodden black woman, and I think what he’s getting at with that statement is the ...