Zibby Mag

Book jacket biographies don’t tell us nearly enough about the authors we love. That’s why Zibby Mag launched the Author Snapshot, giving readers an inside look at the lives and work of our favorite writers.

This week we are featuring Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, authors of You Were Always Mine, the second novel that they’ve teamed up to write together.

What are some of the questions that you set out to explore or answer in writing You Were Always Mine?

We’re passionate about tackling race in intimate spaces. For our first book, we looked at friendship. In this new novel, we turn our attention to motherhood—a Black woman who finds an abandoned white baby and the implications it has for her life, for her family, and for her community.

We came up with this idea for the second book to do together back in 2018. This was well before the world was put in a state of upheaval when it came to the current restrictions concerning motherhood. But now it feels so much more important and poignant and fraught to be discussing. What does motherhood mean in America? Really, how do you choose to become a mother or not? And who gets to make that choice? And as with everything in America, race is a dimension to all of these considerations.

Through the lens of relatable, sympathetic characters who find themselves in impossible situations (and are dealing with their own traumas), we hope to show the ways in which women reckon with being a mother (or not). A major theme of the story is how we create family and what happens when those bonds break.

The choice to become a mother is not binary. It is complicated. So is family. So is race. The driving force that guided us, as it did in We Are Not Like Them, was how to create as much nuance and shades of gray as possible. We also wanted to get people talking, and what is a more powerful discussion question than what makes family? And what are we willing to sacrifice for and in the name of love?

Logistically speaking, how do you write books together? Do you each write one character’s perspective, or do you both work on the entire book?

A common misconception that readers have is that we split the writing along color lines; Jo writes the white characters and Christine, the Black ones. But that’s not our process, nor would that approach allow us to do justice to our stories, or make the books feel cohesive, as if written by one person.

Our process is to start with creating a detailed outline together so we have a roadmap of where the story will go, though as with all journeys we allow for detours and traffic jams. Then one of us will start to write the first draft of a chapter and pass it to the other person when they’re done drafting, and the other person will take a pass at massaging and editing, and back and forth until we’re happy with it. Then we move on to the next chapter. Mostly, we communicate within the Google Doc, in comments, but periodically will get on the phone to hash through questions and sticking points.

This process itself hasn’t changed much since our first book, but it has become more fluid and efficient. We had a lot of learning curves with the first book, and kinks to work out in terms of communication and style. Now, it’s much smoother and less fraught! We’ve saved the tears for our readers, who will hopefully be moved enough to be reaching for Kleenex!

What from your own personal experiences did you incorporate into You Were Always Mine?

Like all novelists, we both drew from our own lives, but also leveraged our very different perspectives to give the book more range and depth. We’ve had very different paths in life—Christine is a godmother and an aunt to so many children and has chosen to be child-free. Jo has three children. So we’ve had many thought-provoking conversations about our different experiences and how it’s shaped our views. And that range has made it onto the page.

There’s so much judgment in our society about the right way to be a mother, or why you choose not to be a mother, or if you have kids biologically, or adopt, etc., and we’ve each been on the receiving end (the nosey woman in the local park who announced on a message board that Jo’s kids were filthy and needed to wear shoes more often; the guy who told Christine that she wasn’t a “real woman” without kids). We drew from these experiences and others to show the variety of ways that women are judged on every aspect of their reproductive choices.

Additionally, Christine’s parents were foster parents and that was a significant inspiration. They went through the process to be certified as emergency foster parents when she was in middle school. Shortly thereafter, they took in two girls—one infant, one toddler—from two different families. The initial placements were supposed to be for up to 72 hours, but her parents ended up adopting the infant and raising her. The toddler was eventually reunited with her birth mom but continued to spend weekends at their house through adulthood. Christine has had a front row seat to the rewards, challenges, and complexities of foster care and the CPS system, of blending families, and of the sense of both belonging and displacement that goes hand in hand with these circumstances. That vantage point infused the story.

I love the titles for both We Are Not Like Them and You Were Always Mine. Were these always the working titles? Did you come up with them together? How much did your editor/publishing team weigh in?

Weirdly, Christine has come up with all the titles for our books (we have one forthcoming called I Never Knew You At All), and they’ve all hit her out of nowhere at the strangest times. This is weird because when she was a book editor, she was not readily coming up with catchy titles for her books. Also, notably, we’ve had all three titles before a word of the books were written! It’s rare in publishing for that to happen—or for the titles not to change. But somehow they just click for our stories, and we’ll just have to keep writing books as long as we have titles that work so well.

You both have really interesting roles and work outside of these novels that you write together. Can you share the other projects and work you’re each pursuing in addition to the release of this book?

We’re excited to have another book together—the aforementioned I Never Knew You At All. We’re deep into writing, and that will come out in 2025. We both have solo projects in the works as well. Jo has a novel forthcoming in April 2024 called The Sicilian Inheritance. It’s loosely based on the real-life murder of her great-great-grandmother in Sicily. But it is very fictionalized! It’s a dual-narrative book club novel rooted in family history about a long-awaited trip to Sicily, a disputed inheritance, and a family secret that some will kill to protect.

Christine’s writing a rom-com ripped from the headlines of her own life (but also very fictionalized!) about a woman who finds herself in a love triangle with two men in her twenties and again in her forties. It’s about first loves and second chances. Atria will publish To All the Men I’ve Loved Again in 2025.

In Jo’s other life as a podcaster: She has some exciting new projects, including a new one she’s produced, out this summer. Wilder is about the life and times and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s hosted by her best friend Glynnis MacNicol, and it is an absolute delight.

What other books would you recommend readers pick up after finishing You Were Always Mine?

We love giving book recommendations—and often find ourselves reading and recommending the same books! Here are a few we’ve loved that have an emphasis on motherhood and family.

Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder

The Whispers by Ashley Audrain

Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey