Read With Jenna Book Club Pick! Award-winning author Nikki May returns to the podcast to discuss THIS MOTHERLESS LAND, a stunning reimagining of Jane Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK (and a masterful exploration of race, identity, privilege, and love) where two extraordinary cousins split between England and Nigeria come to terms with their shared family history. Nikki delves into the inspiration behind this novel, the challenges of writing a second book, and how the grief of losing her brother has shaped her writing. She also shares the books that have gotten her through hard times, the things she does that bring her joy, and the details of her next project!

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Nikki. Thank you so much for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss This Motherless Land. Congratulations. 

Nikki: Thank you for having me.

It's so good to be back in the Zibbyverse. 

Zibby: Oh! I know in your intake form it was saying you were inspired, and we were just chatting about my bookshelves and your bookshelves, and I love that any piece of my life can inspire somebody else, so yay! 

Nikki: I'm over inspired now because yours are still a lot nicer than mine, so I think I need more bookshelves, more color coding.

Zibby: I haven't even touched them. I don't even go over there. I'm like, I, I, it's like I'm. I might as well have a frame in front of it. Yeah, it's art, exactly. So last time we talked about Wahala, and that was really fun, and now, what is going on with that adaptation, by the way? 

Nikki: It's still happening. I actually got a note from the producer last week, and I think it's just the way this industry goes.

It's all slow, slow, slow, and then it's go, go, go. So they're talking about director will be on board in March, and pre prod will start in March. So fingers crossed, it's definitely happening. It's greenlit. It's just a question of everything falling into place. Watch this space. 

Zibby: March is soon, though. That's very encouraging.

Nikki: I guess. I guess. 

Zibby: That's exciting. Very exciting. So I went back and here's what you said. I asked you about book two when we spoke last time and here's what you said. You said, book two is so hard, Zibby. If they told me what I knew now, it would have been a one book deal. When you're writing your first book, you're just you and your book and your words.

No expectation. You don't even know that much about writing. I didn't think about genre or point of view. You're just writing from the heart. Then suddenly you've got a deadline, a clock going tick tock tick tock, which obviously makes you freeze and do nothing. You've got expectation. You've got people saying things about your book, which are mostly lovely, but you haven't really imbued your book with all of this.

Suddenly there's the, oh my God, will it be good enough? I'm writing book two. I've got 90 000 not very great words, which I'm pulling into shape. I do love my story. It's loosely inspired by Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. It's got a mixed race girl in it. I think all my books will have some. I want to reflect myself in literature.

I want to read about people like me. She's growing up in Nigeria. A tragedy strikes. When she's 10, she's moved to an English family. at a house called The Ring. So, brown girl in the Ring, which I guess was the old title, it's going to touch on thorny areas of race and prejudice and class at its heart. It's a love story and a coming of age story because I quite like an epic twist.

I think there might be one of those in there. 

Nikki: It was, like, so long ago. 

Zibby: Um, I loved reading that description after reading This Motherless Land to see how close the two aligned and what you thought when writing it, because it certainly doesn't seem like it was hard to write when you read it, but of course, how does one know?

Nikki: It was very hard. It was really, I'm now starting book three, and it's even harder, so it doesn't get better, Zibby. 

Zibby: Oh, no! But you must love it, or else why do it? 

Nikki: I don't know, I think I love it and I hate it, and I always say I don't love the stage I'm on, but there's nothing like holding your own finished book in your hands.

And I think I just, I dream about my characters, I dream about my story, so I think it's one of those love hate things, but I have to do it. 

Zibby: Yeah, I get that. Okay, so that was a brief encapsulation based on long ago, but talk a little bit more about this motherless land. And I know it came out in the UK first, is that right?

Nikki: Yes. 

Zibby: And so that's so, it's so crazy. You get like such a preview of launch, right? 

Nikki: I know, I know. And you get real people reading it and tell you what they think, which is good practice in the States, I guess. But yes, so it hasn't actually changed that much from how I described it two years ago. So it is, I was inspired by Mansfield Park, this idea of a young girl being ripped away from everything she knows and loves and thrust into a really alien environment, having to prove herself over and over.

That just hooked me and that was the idea that gripped me hard enough to make the challenging job of writing that difficult second album worthwhile. And, It's, it's a very personal story. It's about place and displacement, about belonging, about grief, about privilege and prejudice. And I really did have to dig deep into what I know, because when we meet Funke in 1978, she's basically living my life.

She's in my house in Lagos with my parrot, Billy. She's rides my green chopper around the quiet campus streets with my little brother, just like I did. She goes to my beach at the weekends. And even her mother, Mrs. Lizzie is very inspired by my mother who taught at my primary school. And. All the kids loved her because unlike the Nigerian teachers, my English mother abhorred corporal punishment.

So she was lavishing cuddles on kids when all the other teachers were being proper teachers and giving them taps on the fingers with a ruler. So it really was personal. I've always said I think writing is cheaper than therapy. And I certainly seem to use it for that. And I recreated Edmund as Liv. We're not in Georgian days anymore, so cousin sex would have given my readers the ick.

And my editor was really clear about that. So it's still a love story, but it's a platonic friendship love story rather than the romantic kind. And I think at the heart, what I was trying to do was find out whether love can make the difference between surviving and thriving, throwing a lot of problems at my two protagonists, making life pretty difficult for them, and seeing whether they could sink or swim.

As I say, it's really personal. I had a lot of fun writing it. It was also fun to poke at privilege and prejudice in both my homes. Because I've experienced both things in both places. I think it's just human nature, we're just, we just love an ism and wherever there's different sorts of people we're going to poke at differences and exploit them.

So hopefully it's a very entertaining, page turning read, because although it can sound quite heavy when I talk about it, it's not, I try not to bash readers on the head with issues, it's meant to be an entertaining tale. 

Zibby: Absolutely. Well, there is definitely a lot of. grief and trauma in the book and you really feel immediately like you're sucked into this world.

I mean, I don't think it's giving too much away or can I, it's right in the beginning where there's this horrible car accident and Funky's mother and sibling die in this horrific way and she wakes up and has to be told that they've passed away and somehow, you know, her aunts and her family find new path for her and all that but it is It's so intense, and especially as someone who, like, you can just tell the adoration for her mother from the beginning, even though she's annoyed to be at the same school, blah, blah, blah.

Just to have that primary relationship ripped away at the beginning, talk about even just writing that and why you started the book there when it, you know, where to start books is also a big question at times, like, why, why start there and, and tell me a little bit more about that loss.

Nikki: I think I wanted to start with a bang and I really felt that it was important to rip Funke away from what she knew and loved.

I know when I moved to England, when I was 20, when I moved to London, and I was shocked. I found lots of things hugely shocking. Great shocks, like chocolate everywhere, bookshops everywhere. Light, power, electricity, just coming on when you tapped a switch. Running water coming out of the tap all the time.

But also horrible shocks, like racism, which I'd never seen before. And being the sort of condescension from other people was very new, and I hated it. And I thought if I give these problems to a nine year old who has just lost her mind, just had her world ripped apart, then it's almost I mean, it's evil, but authors often are.

It was, it just made her this lens to see these problems through really clearly. There's also something about, I didn't want to write a YA book, and I really was in two minds of whether to start with a nine year old, but children can be such a good way to see the stupidity of adults through, and I just thought this could be quite fun to do.

And I also didn't mean to write a saga, but it turned out to three, two decades, it turned out to span two continents. I think sometimes your characters tell you what they want to do, and you don't really have a choice in it. When we spoke a couple of years ago, it was very much Funke's story, which is why it was Brown Girl in the Ring.

But when I read those 90, 000 terrible words back, I realized I was telling slightly the wrong story. Story and it had to be about Funke and Liv. I kind of fell in love with Liv when I was writing her and she became hugely important. So it became very different from how I'd seen it in the beginning. I sometimes think for every word that ends up on the page, I've written five of them.

I certainly try to make life as hard as possible for myself. . 

Zibby: So when you decided to include Liv, that's when you came up with having a second viewpoint altogether. 'cause now you alternate the the points of view and everything. 

Yes, and I sometimes think privilege can be just as challenging as prejudice.

And I wanted to, because Liv is a great person and she has this privilege, and privilege can be hard to carry. There are two things, privilege and prejudice. We never want to admit to being prejudiced and we never want to admit to having privilege. But again, I've had both and faced both in both my countries.

So it was quite nice to use Liv and Funke almost as mirrors to reflect each other on really simple binaries. I mean, I love mirrors in literature anyway, but to have one rich, one poor, one black, one white, one conformist, one a rebel, one with a wonderful mother who's dead and one with an absolutely terrible mother who's alive was just this really, it was fun to do.

It was fun to watch them and still have that real relationship between them. 

So if there's a message that you want to come out from all of these contrasts, what is the message? That we're all the same deep down, or we can learn from each other, or like, what are some of the things you hope we take away?

Nikki: For me, I think it shows the irrationality and the stupidity of racism and that sort of looking down on people because of simple differences. To me, it just shows how stupid It is, I also think it's a story about love and about legacy. One of the things I like most when readers pick it up is how Mrs Lizzie, who is dead by page by page 20, I think, how she still has this legacy in the people she's touched.

And sometimes what you leave It's so simple, it's just in the people you've been good to, it's in how you carry yourself, it's in how you behave on a day to day basis with waiters, with shop staff, with, with anyone. I think, I think that was, I think that's so important to sort of carry yourself in the right way all the time and I do think that was the best legacy Funke's mother could have left her and it helped shape her life.

Zibby: I mean, there's some religions where that is, that is God, right? Showing love is where you find God on earth is in the way you treat other people and all that. So anyway. 

Nikki: Sounds like a better religion than most of them. 

Zibby: You lost your own brother. I'm so sorry. Right. Tell me, can you talk about that? And I'm so sorry.

Nikki: I'll try, but it's really difficult. It was, it'll be three years in a month or so. Grief is a bitch. I mean, I can't put it any other way. It was also, I've got two parents who were broken, still are. So in some ways looking after them means that you don't actually address your own grief. But, and it really did, in some ways it really helped with writing this, because I really know now, I've been so blessed, I've been so lucky that I'm 59, and this is the first time I've felt that kind of loss and grief, and how it permeates everything.

And, and the things that are involved in grief, the guilt, the anger, the things I didn't expect and didn't know what to do with, and resentment, and that I wish I'd done this, and I wish I'd done that, and that sort of stuff. And also coming, sorry Sippy, coming to the point when what really matters is love.

And I, I know it's very trite, but you wouldn't change anything. You, cause, cause having loved someone is such an important part of life that even now, I mean, yes, I would have him back in a heartbeat, but I, I, I'm so grateful he was my brother. I'm so grateful for those riding the choppers around those quiet campus streets.

I'm so grateful for the, for the fun we had, for the, for the good times and the bad. So, yeah. I guess, I think to write authentically you have to have felt these things, so I do, and I, I think my writing is very much, it's not autobiographical, but I am very much influenced by what I know, so in some ways it's a tribute to him and hopefully I handle grief appropriately in it.

Zibby: Oh, Nikki, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh, I actually, I just, earlier this week, I interviewed Richard Powers, who just lost his sister, Peg. And, you know, he, he mentioned how there's nothing that highlights his own mortality than losing a sibling, that it's, it's one thing to, to lose a sibling lose parents or whatever, but just to, that's like your closest DNA.

Nikki: And I've known him every day of my life, you know, I'm two years older than him and he's been there forever. And I think also, cause he was younger and he wasn't, he, you know, but you sort of feel that protective thing and almost like you let him down and which is silly, but you can't help how you feel. 

Zibby: Oh, what can I ask what happened?

It's none of my business, but ..

Nikki: He had a heart attack. 

Zibby: Yeah. Sudden. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. I have a younger brother and I can put, you know, I'm just so sorry. All that love. And, um, but you do feel it. I mean, you can feel it in the, in the book and you can feel, you know, grief is just its own. Horrific. 

Nikki: It is.

And one of the funny things about grief is life goes on and I think that's where the anger comes from. Because you want to say, stop, how can you just behave like things are normal? They aren't. Do you know what's happened? Because of course grief is so personal. So our grief becomes this huge thing. It's also hugely selfish because we turn ourselves into the most important thing and our loss was bigger than anybody else's loss.

And then the worst thing about grief, I think, is forgetting. Occasionally, you forget, and then you think, Oh, I must phone Deji and tell him this, or Deji would love this song. And then you, and it's almost like you, it's being hit with a sledgehammer all over again. So it's, but it's, to live is to feel grief.

I think it's part of, part of the human process. And I just think we're getting worse and worse at dealing with it. We're so illiquid to deal with death. I think in the book I cover it, the words we use, you know, she's passed, she's gone to a better place, which for a nine year old, which is hugely confusing, and sometimes I think bare language might actually be better than these euphemisms that we dress things in.

Zibby: I agree. There's so much preparation we get in school for so many things that don't even happen or that aren't worthwhile. Like all this time we spend learning math. Not to, you know, not to be.. 

Nikki: I've got a calculator on my iPhone. I don't need math. 

Zibby: Like it's useless. But if we all had like a requi we're all going to have death in our lives, like we are human beings.

It would be it's almost impossible not to. Why don't we learn about that? Why don't we? 

Nikki: Exactly. 

Zibby: You know. 

Nikki: And learn how it, how normal it is. 

Zibby: Yeah. And I don't think it's selfish. I mean, it's like, you know, if you lost a limb, you could, you know, would you feel selfish being upset about it? It's your whole world, right?

Nikki: Yeah. 

Zibby: Something is chopped off. And anyway, I'm so very, very sorry. And my heart goes out to you and your family. Everybody, I'm sorry. Does that make writing book three even harder then? Or are you throwing it in? Are you, are you channeling some of the emotions? 

Nikki: I'm channeling some of that rage. I'm finding being angry is actually a really useful creative tool.

I'm also channeling a bit of getting older. I'm going to be 60 next year. I don't feel it. 

Zibby: You look amazing, by the way. You look so young. I was shocked a minute ago when you said that. I mean, wow. 

Nikki: I'm eternally 33. I just. I have to actually do the math and think 65 and do the bad math because I wasn't very good at it.

But, and I think there's this thing about ageism in two directions. There's the way 60 year olds can be invisible and can almost be tragic if we want to be young. And there's also this new youngism I'm calling it, where we're treating young people, we call them snowflakes. So we, we pretend they're lazy, that they can't buy houses because they're having too many avocado sandwiches or, or caramel lattes.

So I think it's really, and it's always women that get the brunt of this stuff. You know, 60 year old men are not tragic. They're, they're trendy and cool and amazing. So I'm channeling, I also love an ism. I think I've done racism to death now. I've done a bit of sexism. sexism. So I'm going to throw ageism and youngism into this book.

It's about women. It's about friendship. It's about spiky flawed women, but, um, and it's set in an advertising agency. I worked in an ad agency or my when I had a real job and I loved it. And I, as you know, I write what I know. So I'm moving them in. It's also a really good experience. It's an excuse to re watch Mad Men over and over, and I'll take anything that lets me keep watching Mad Men, so I'm sort of in that wonderful stage where I'm plotting, I'm building my characters, I'm thinking about characters, snippets of conversation, I'm thinking about scenes and it's an excuse to watch lots of telly and read lots of books because it's research.

Zibby: Love it. I love that. I worked at two different ad agencies when I was younger, and I found it fascinating because putting yourself in the shoes of consumers is very similar to writing and reading, right? It's all about, you know, different points of view and connecting to people where they are and, you know,.. 

Nikki: I think it's the best grounding I could have had.

It was the best training ground. And I think it also teaches you to be edited, because there's not all, all my great headlines got changed by the clients. You're used to things being, you're used to having to fight for your ideas and really believe in them. And also to know who your target audience are and to understand when something just doesn't stick.

So I, I, I loved working in advertising. And again, this is going to be a bit of a homage to that. I think Wahalla was very much a nod to London, which I loved and to my youthful days of parties and going out and eating out every single day. And this motherless land is a bit of an homage to both my cultures and this one book three, I think it's going to be to advertising, which I loved.

I'm glad I'm not in it anymore, but I did love it when I was. 

Zibby: Now, even when I'm like walking down the street and a bus goes by and I see like an ad, I'm like, what on earth? Like, what was the creative brief that ended up with this ad? What were they thinking? Like, what room of people decided this was a good idea?

Do you feel like that? 

Nikki: Totally. I sometimes pause in the middle of the ad to shout at my husband because we work together in advertising. It's like, what were they thinking? I bet the client changed that at the last minute, but yeah, you sort of dissect them all. 

Zibby: Yeah. I know. I was mentioning this to my daughter as a bus went by and she's like, I was like, no, it was such an interesting job.

And she's like, that sounds so boring. You just like, talk about product. I was like, what? No, you know, but meanwhile, you know, I would always like read the descriptive copy on like a bottle of shampoo as a kid. Do you know what I mean? Like, why are, why do these things interest you?

Nikki: I also think it's really for all the time I worked in advertising, my mom and my dad, and pretty much everyone I know would say, I'm never influenced by ads.

They don't work for me at all. And it goes to them the kitchen and you'd see the fairy liquid and you'd check the name of their smeg fridge and you think, actually love, you are, you're standing there in your Lululemon yoga pants pretending you're not affected by advertising. You really are. 

Zibby: Yeah. Well, we all are.

I mean, it's.

Nikki: Of course we are. 

Zibby: And there's that, you know, similar to books too. There's this desire to sort be doing what other people are doing in a way, reading what other people are reading, and wearing what other people are wearing, right? We just, everybody is so, just clamoring for a way to be a part of something.

Nikki: Exactly. 

Zibby: You know, so we all want community. Yeah. In terms of reading, has, have there been any books that have either through the grief that have helped you the most or just in general that you've just enjoyed reading? 

Nikki: I did. I was trying to look after my mom in particular after my brother died. So I think I bought every book on grief going and listened to every grief podcast more for her than for me.

But one book that really helped is by a lady called Carrie Adloyed. She's actually a comedian. And I think it's called you were not alone. And she manages to make this really warm, tender, wonderful book funny. She lost her dad and it's very much about that but it, it also has these, it, I think it has lots of coping mechanisms.

And, you know, I talked about grief, grief being really selfish. It helps you realize that you really aren't alone, that there's so many other people. I think grief can actually end up making you a slightly better person because having gone through that, I'm now. So much more able to understand other people going through it.

So that was helpful. But one of the best things about being a writer is free books. People are throwing arcs at you before they come out. So my TBR pile, which was always pretty dodgy, is now towering ridiculously. And I just, I'm halfway through a book called Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkinson, who wrote Black Cake, and I'm enjoying it.

It's a bit misty. It's a bit of a saga. It's about stories we inherit, which I love. So enjoying that. And last night, I finished The Wedding People. 

Zibby: Oh, yes. Yes. 

Nikki: And I loved it.

Zibby: I loved it. 

Nikki: I feel like a book with really rich, beautiful, glamorous people in really wonderful, beautiful, glamorous locations. And it's also really funny.

I'm enjoying a bit of a funny book at the minute and that was a really good, readable, but still quite tender and quite human. 

Zibby: Actually, she, um, the author of that, it was my, Zibby's book club pick or whatever for this month or last month. 

Nikki: Good choice. 

Zibby: Yeah, I loved it. And when I interviewed Allison about it, she actually, not to keep talking about grief, but she lost her brother in high school in a car accident.

And I felt like when she talked about that and learning the lens, and she also felt she had to take care of her parents and that at the end of the school day, the crazy days in high school where all these you know, silly in a way things happen and to go home to such a dark place that she had to make it all kind of funny for them.

So I feel like that instinct is in the book a little bit too. I don't know. 

Nikki: And I think when you do that, I think when you're having to look after other people, in some ways you're delaying your own grief and delaying processing it, which, which I don't know. We'll see what happens. I think there's still some work to be done.

Zibby: I'm going to send you, I just read this other, not that we, we've I'm sorry for keeping talking about grief here. Wait, no, I can't even find it. It was on my desk. Well, anyway, there's another great grief book that I will send you that I just read recently. Which I'm missing. But anyway, I'll look it up. It's coming out soon.

Anyway, okay, when you're not angry or grieving or writing or watching TV to research, is there a guilty pleasure you have? Is there something for you? fun or something that you're like, oh, at least I have this coming next week that I could really look forward to or whatever as an escape. 

Nikki: I'm still a wahalo girl.

I still love my lunches with my girls. I still love nothing more than a gossipy bitchy session with people I've known for years where we can actually be together. Just so honest and just so open. And because we're all so busy, these things happen less and less frequently. I'm sure in my twenties and thirties, I'm sure we met at least twice a week.

Now we're really lucky if it's twice a year. So these become such treasured moments. And we started trying to make weekends or overnights out of them. So we can cram it all in and fix in something holistic, like a facial to make up for the excess bottles of wine or gin and tonics. That we've consumed, and I would still say friends are the loves of my life.

And I've, we've realized that although it's a chore almost to make these things happen, it's so important and so fundamental to our happiness and our state of mind. I think there's a way women interact with each other that it's just so real and so, so hopeful, but also so challenging that I just think it makes.

It, it makes me a better person to be around friends and walking my dogs. I, um, the dogs keep me sane all weather, whatever happens we go. And I think it helps you stay really grounded with nature and with, with what really matters. You know, I could be a really flash author one minute, tripping to London, but my real life is wearing wellies, walking in the rain, being mud spattered and trying to stop my schnauzers from rolling in fox poo.

Zibby: Oh, I love that image. Oh my goodness. Nikki, thank you so much. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for another fabulous book and for just being so open and honest. I know that your words, someone out there today is listening to this and that's going to help them get through their day by you being so open about it.

So I really, really appreciate it. I know it's helped me. 

Nikki: Thank you for having me again, Zibby. This is a highlight and it's so good to have been on twice. 

Zibby: Yay. All right. We'll save you a spot. Book three. Keep going. All right. Take care, Nikki. 

Nikki: Thanks, Zibby. Take care. Bye. 

Zibby: Bye bye.