The book’s force comes as much from its form as from its content. The arc sounds conventional enough, distinctive though the specifics may be.

And in the wake of her death, as Thandi unexpectedly confronts the possibility of becoming a parent herself, she struggles to come to terms with what her mother’s life was, and what hers should be. Her relationship with her mother is loving but difficult. Thandi’s self-proclaimed status as a “strange in-betweener”-she has “light skin and foreign roots,” and feels neither fully black American nor fully African-is a defining preoccupation of her young adulthood. Thandi, like Clemmons, was raised in a wealthy, mostly white suburb of Philadelphia. The protagonist is Thandi, who, like Clemmons herself, is the daughter of a “coloured” South African mother and an African American father. It tells a story based loosely on the author’s own. The new novel that emerged, What We Lose, is a startling, poignant debut, released to no shortage of fanfare ( Vogue called it “the debut novel of the year”). “I just ended up keeping those pieces and stitching them together, and a fictional narrative arose.” The novel she had been working on no longer felt worth her while she’d been trying to use it, she said, to “avoid what was going on with my mom.” “The only time and energy I could muster resulted in that very short form,” she said recently. She moved back home to Philadelphia and kept writing, but differently now, taking notes and collecting fragments of text as she cared for her mother. Clemmons had been writing a novel with a more or less linear narrative structure. When Zinzi Clemmons was a graduate student at Columbia, at work on her MFA, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

What we lose by zinzi clemmons