I spoke with Gyasi about writing a novel inspired by neuroscience, the unique challenges faced by Black immigrants to America, and the meaning of transcendence and salvation. Though a pious member of her family’s otherwise all-white church as a child, Gifty struggles with a loss of faith, efforts to coax her mother back to life, and the alienation she finds in even her closest relationships as she attends Harvard and moves on to graduate school. After his death, her mother falls into a deep depression, often not leaving her bed for weeks on end. Nana, a talented rising star on the basketball court, is prescribed opioids after an injury and ends up a heroin addict. When the Chin Chin Man, as Gifty and her older brother Nana call him, finds the racism and joylessness of life in Huntsville too much to endure, he returns to Kumasi and the family is never quite the same. Gifty’s mother immigrated to Alabama, her father reluctantly in tow. Gyasi’s second novel Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty, a Ghanaian-American doctoral student at Stanford studying the neuroscience of addiction and depression in mice.
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