When Angela Flournoy visited her father’s childhood home in East Detroit, she was struck by the contrast between the house and the city surrounding it. The house had been maintained over the years dating back to the 1940s. But the once-flourishing city around it had fallen into ruins. And with it, perhaps, the American Dream.
Angela Flournoy wrote her debut novel The Turner House based on that experience. The Turner house on Yarrow Street is the still-beating heart of this story of thirteen siblings, and one ghost. As the family contemplates selling the house as the mortgage goes unpaid, the individual stories of its members move back and forth across its threshold. Cha-cha, the oldest sibling, is haunted by a haint, or ghost, from childhood into his adult years. His sister Lelah struggles with her gambling addiction at Detroit casinos, becoming homeless and sneaking back into the house for rent-free shelter. Family matriarch Viola, lying on her death bed, gathers her family around her, including those trying to trick her into selling the house.
Flournoy says, “Just hearing my father’s stories about the place he grew up — when they first moved there - it was still a very mixed neighborhood. There were no empty lots; there were no abandoned houses. It was a very prosperous city. And then (came) the rapid depopulation Detroit experienced over the next forty years. More than strong emotions, I felt a curiosity.”
Flournoy began writing the novel while attending the Iowa Writers Workshop. Its first title was "The Haunting of Detroit.” She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California and has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University. Flournoy was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father, one of thirteen siblings, from Detroit.
The Turner House was chosen as a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection. Flournoy’s fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review and she's written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others.
(Angela Flournoy read from The Turner House at Bookbug in Kalamazoo on Wednesday, April 29, 2015.)
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