1) Your book My Parents’ Marriage is such an insightful tale of culture, class, and more. Does your background as a Ghanaian and American allow you to both immerse in the culture and to view the various layers of this society from a writerly distance? If so, was this needed to capture the full scope of what is a very complex cultural structure?

Thank you so much for your review of my book! I was really focused on capturing the nuances of Ghanaian culture and I’m grateful you were able to connect with its specificity.

As for your question, you’ve answered it for me—you’ve really put my experience as a Ghanaian-American writer perfectly. Growing up American and Ghanaian, a lot of my process for asking questions and seeking understanding of both cultures, and my place in them, involved writing. 

I definitely think living between multiple cultural realities has given me a unique lens on the social structures I’ve been immersed in, but I don’t think you have to have a hybrid identity to meaningfully capture a culture’s complexities. We all have a distinct perspective on what’s going on around us.

2) What was your inspiration for writing this book?

There were many reasons that writing this book became urgent for me.

For starters, I was on deadline to turn in a revised manuscript and I no longer felt convinced the one I had been working on was right. It was a scary epiphany, but I was also very clear that I had to write something new.

Parallel to that realization, I was in a relationship that was becoming serious, and as I contemplated marriage it led me to think about what shaped my ideas about marriage. I started to research marriage and culture for my own interest and really examine the two cultures that have shaped my expectations around marriage. The deeper I went, the more switched on I became to the tensions enshrined in Ghanaian marriage customs and laws and how they impacted people’s lives on the most personal levels. Because the tensions—tradition versus modernity, customary values versus colonial imposition, patriarchy versus feminism, to name a few—are not unique to Ghanaian marriage and culture, I felt excited to present this highly specific story to readers in and outside Ghana.

3) During the process of writing this book, did you know how the story would go or did you discover this as the narrative unfolded? 

I kept a one-sentence description of the story in the footer of my manuscript so I would not veer off course as I wrote, but outside of that I let the narrative unfold. I played with structure and perspective quite a bit. In one draft, the story was told from Kokui and Boris’s daughter’s perspective. In several drafts, I played with the book bouncing between Boris’s and Kokui’s points of view. But in each draft, Kokui dominated. I realized it was her story and focused from there.

4) Kokui Nuga is a great character. Though she is not a young child, did your experience as a children’s book author play any part in how you approached her journey in the story?

Thank you so much—I really enjoyed writing Kokui. I wasn’t necessarily conscious of my experience writing for children as I was developing her character, but I did deliberately write her to have a childlike spirit and to show her growing pains. I wanted to lean into her working out her hopes and dreams as she bumped up against disappointment and her own weaknesses. In short, I wanted to capture the growth that happens in early adulthood or times of great transition. In many societies, we tend to focus on the spurts that happen in early childhood and adolescence, but growth is always happening. We grow until the day we die and even after we do, our remains become the fertilizer for new growth.

5) The images in your book are so vivid and jump off the page. Would you consider yourself a visual person?

Thank you so much! I do love a highly detailed, visual description. When I read, I want to be able to picture what is going on—it helps me feel invested in the narrative—so I try to offer as much sensory and emotional information as I can to help my readers immerse themselves.

6) Are there any authors that have influenced how you approach your work?

I love Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood so much for the humanness of her characters and the way the narrative is paced. It’s not a long book, yet it covers so much ground without feeling rushed. I aspire to write like that.    

I read Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter after I wrote My Parents’ Marriage: A Novel, but along the same lines as The Joys of Motherhood, I so appreciated how she was able to create such a nuanced tale of society, tradition, and progress, helmed by richly developed female characters, with such economy of words.

7) The women in the book encompass a wide range of generational experiences and reactions to these experiences. Were any more difficult to get on the page than another? 

I had so much love, respect, and empathy for all of the characters in my book, especially the women. For that reason, I didn’t find them difficult to develop in terms of craft, but they each brought up different emotions for me. Kokui had me squirming in my seat a lot based on her reasoning and the choices she was making. I cried as I wrote many of the scenes between Kokui and her mother and her sister. I really felt for the pain they were in and the bind they each felt. Auntie Hemaa was a tricky one for me. I hated how she was treated and I hated that she chose to get back at her husband through his children. It frustrated me that none of the women directly confronted the man at the center of their anguish, but as the writer it was important to me that the characters be true to themselves and the situation they found themselves in.

8) What has been the response in Ghana to your book? 

I’m thrilled to say that the Ghanaian readers who have shared their feedback with me have all appreciated that I delve into the topic of marriage from a Ghanaian perspective because we don’t often openly discuss the tensions in our customs and laws or how it affects us personally. Most Ghanaians have direct or extended experience with polygyny in their families, and pretty much every Ghanaian is familiar with the multiple nuptial ceremonies from knocking to “engagement” to “white wedding”. We enjoy the celebrations even as some of us lament the costs involved and acknowledge it can get confusing. Along the same lines, many Ghanaians are aware of the lawsuits that break out in families when a wealthy man with multiple wives and kids dies. It’s been gratifying to chat with different Ghanaian and African readers and reviewers about some of these nuances in our societies.  

Thank you Nana, for sharing your thoughts on your wonderful novel and your writing process.