Nadia Owusu headshotToday on The PEN Pod, we spoke with Brooklyn-based writer Nadia Owusu. A Whiting Award winner, Nadia tells the complex tale of her parents and family, as well as her struggles with the concepts of home and identity in her first book, the memoir Aftershocks. The book was selected as one of 13 new books to watch for in January 2021 by The New York Times, one of the best books to read in 2021 by Vogue, one of the 10 new books you should read in January 2021 by TIME magazine, one of BookExpo America’s buzziest books of the year, and one of Oprah.com’s 55 most anticipated books of 2021, among other honors. She joined us to speak about the story behind the memoir, the experience of writing it, and what she’s reading now. Listen below for our full conversation (our interview with Nadia is up until the 10:52 mark).

Aftershocks reckons with both an actual earthquake and the surprise re-emergence of your mother when you were just a kid. What made you want to sit down and write this story?
My mother left when I was two, and my sister and I were raised by our father—who I really adored—and he worked for a UN agency so we moved around a lot to a different country every couple of years. When I was seven, we were living in Rome, and my mother showed up at our house on the same day that I learned about a catastrophic earthquake that destroyed a city in Armenia. I heard that on the radio—my father always listened to the BBC World Service in the morning—and then my mother showed up. Later that day, she took my sister and me to lunch, we walked around Rome, and then she dropped us back at our house and left.

My mother is Armenian American. So because of that, and then maybe also because my father generally avoided talking about her, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. And so, somehow in my mind, that sort of private shaking at my mother coming and going again, and this earthquake, conflated in me. That’s a really clear memory that I have of those kinds of two earthquakes—one real and one a metaphor—in my life that really shaped how I saw myself in my family and in the world.


“We lived in Ethiopia and Uganda during the Civil Wars. And I was at the World Trade Center when the second plane crashed into the tower. And so, I came to think of my life as existing on these fault lines—my mother is descended from genocide survivors. I wanted to reckon with all of those larger forces—those disasters and other big forces—that shaped my life because of the ways they shaped my family’s decisions, and then also to look at how they played out in my private moments with my family as well.”


My father was born in Ghana, the year before independence. Because of his job, we lived in Ethiopia and Uganda during the Civil Wars. And I was at the World Trade Center when the second plane crashed into the tower. And so, I came to think of my life as existing on these fault lines—my mother is descended from genocide survivors. I wanted to reckon with all of those larger forces—those disasters and other big forces—that shaped my life because of the ways they shaped my family’s decisions, and then also to look at how they played out in my private moments with my family as well. So I started exploring that as a private project just for myself, really. I didn’t have ambitions to publish it at first. In fact, I was working on a novel that was something completely different. But then some years after I first began to write about all of this, I went back to some of that raw material and wondered if I could make art out of it.

Without talking too much about the details of the book—you lost your father as a teenager in a tumultuous time and then came to New York, where you had your own struggles with mental health—I wonder how you were able to plumb that personal history and also deal with having to re-experience it in the process of writing it.
It was really important to me to write about those experiences—and my struggles with depression and anxiety—because there is a harmful, dominant narrative that holds that mental illness is weakness. There’s a lot of shame associated with it, and shame that I carried because of it. I think this is true in many cultures, but I wanted in particular to write about it as a Black woman, because specifically, we are often told that we have to be strong, that we have to work twice as hard for half as much, that we don’t have time to indulge in sadness or depression.

Some people claim that depression is a white person thing, and this is really damaging. It contributes to this feeling that we can’t allow ourselves to be fully who we are. We walk around with masks on and try to escape from our grief. What I found is that that doesn’t work—it actually catches up with you because your body is dealing with it even as you deny it. So I wanted to write about that, and I wanted to write from inside of my breakdown—that was also a reckoning—because I wanted the writing to show how that kind of depression and anxiety feel in the body and mind.


“It was really important to me to write about those experiences—and my struggles with depression and anxiety—because there is a harmful, dominant narrative that holds that mental illness is weakness. There’s a lot of shame associated with it, and shame that I carried because of it. I think this is true in many cultures, but I wanted in particular to write about it as a Black woman, because specifically, we are often told that we have to be strong, that we have to work twice as hard for half as much, that we don’t have time to indulge in sadness or depression.”


In terms of how I approached it, I had notebooks from that time that were really helpful in reconnecting with those sensations and thoughts. In some ways, those sections were the most difficult to write because it did bring it all up for me again. But in the writing, I could also see the work I had done on myself and the progress I had made to expel those harmful stories about mental illness—and to create a new story for myself.

I feel like there’s this incredible wave of writers and memoirists who are tapping into this rootedness—or lack of rootedness—and identity, and growing up around the world. That’s been a theme of memoirs for generations, but I feel like you’ve touched on something that’s very forward-looking. I wonder, for other writers—especially of personal memoir and personal narrative—what kind of advice you might have for them?
I think the best advice I can give is to really write into the questions that you’re carrying in your body, and into your most profound and deepest curiosities about yourself and the world. I’ll also say that approaching what I was writing—as I said, as sort of a private project in the beginning—was really freeing because I was truly reckoning with those questions for myself, to discover new possibilities for myself, not just as an artist, but also as a person.

I was interrogating stories I’d been given that didn’t serve me, and trying to write stories that I could live inside of that would help me move toward healing and deeper connection to my family, deeper understanding, compassion, community, and knowledge of and love for the places that I came from. I think allowing yourself, as a memoirist, to really go wild and deep and not worry about what anyone will think—at least when you’re beginning a project—is so important. I would really say that’s the best advice that I can think of.


“I was interrogating stories I’d been given that didn’t serve me, and trying to write stories that I could live inside of that would help me move toward healing and deeper connection to my family, deeper understanding, compassion, community, and knowledge of and love for the places that I came from. I think allowing yourself, as a memoirist, to really go wild and deep and not worry about what anyone will think—at least when you’re beginning a project—is so important.”


We’re still in the throes of a pandemic, but with some hope on the horizon; we’re now in this post-Trump moment in the United States, although who knows what comes next. What is it like having a book like this come out right now, both as a writer—with book tours canceled and things like that—but also just having a memoir like this land at this really uncertain time?
I think in some ways, thematically, it makes a lot of sense that my book is coming out at a time like this, because it is about uncertainty, reckoning, learning to live with that uncertainty, and finding within that imagination about what could be. As this is my first book, I don’t have anything to compare it to in terms of what it’s like to be on tour or to be able to go out into the world and talk to people in person about the book. But I did have the benefit of watching other writer friends release books last year, even in the spring when we were all just getting used to this new reality that we were living in.

I did allow myself to feel sad that I wouldn’t get to go out into bookstores, but at the same time, I’m really grateful for how thoughtfully bookstores and other event hosts have been about virtual events, and for the graciousness of other writers in doing those events with me, and for the many messages of support and excitement that I’ve received from loved ones—but also from strangers who showed up at my virtual launch events last week. In some ways, the silver lining is that I have family all over the world—which is part of what this book is about—who wouldn’t have been able to come to my launch—if it were in Brooklyn, for example, but were able to join on Zoom. I had an uncle who joined from Rome and an aunt who dialed in from Singapore, and I think people are really reaching for art and for ways to come together to celebrate right now. So that has been really lovely.

Finally, what are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, and also Just Us by Claudia Rankine. I was reading those at the same time. Next I hope to start today, The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.