Charmaine Wilkerson on the Secrets that Shape Our Culture

Goodreads: Congratulations on the success of Black Cake! I was moved and riveted by this book, and impressed by the intergenerational scope of it. How does it feel to be on the verge of having your book come out? 

Charmaine Wilkerson: Well, officially, I'm thrilled. Unofficially, it's a little disorienting. It’s only beginning to dawn on me now, about seven weeks from publication, that this book really is going to reach readers. I always wanted to write stories. But as I came of age as a young adult, I made other, more practical choices. I worked in news and communication for years. And those are very interesting ways to live in the world! But I always felt as though I wanted to write fiction. So it's not an exaggeration to say that having my debut novel come out in February will be a dream come true. 

GR: What changed that made you finally decide to write a novel? 

CW: I made a decision half a dozen years ago to reduce the amount of time I was spending working at other things and really, finally dedicate more of my time to writing fiction regularly.  

I did not know that what I was writing—what eventually became Black Cake—was going to be a novel. I am the kind of storyteller who just writes. I write in scenes, meaning an idea comes to me or I'm sitting at the computer—because you have to just take the time to sit down and let your thoughts come to the page. I write ideas. I write about characters who come to me. I write about things that surround me, maybe sensory details.


GR: Do you remember that moment when you realized you were writing a novel? 

CW: I'm not sure that I fully remember the exact moment. What I do remember is, at a certain point, the story took on a life of its own. And then I saw the whole story. I knew there was a murder—that's not a secret. It's not a murder mystery, but there is a murder, and there is a mystery. But I didn't know who had committed the murder right away. And all of a sudden, one day I thought, [gasps] now I know who did it! Just as if I'd been watching the movie. 

GR: What inspired you to feature black cake in your story?

CW: Several years ago, a younger member of my family wrote to me asking for my mother's rum cake recipe. It's what many Caribbeans call "black cake." It's a very dark, rich, rum-soaked fruit cake. My mother made a legendary cake. And I started thinking about the ways in which we inherit culture through food or otherwise. And also the things some people choose to hold close to their hearts and how that plays out in a multicultural family like mine, where no two people really look exactly alike and no two generations have had the same upbringing. I just thought about that and jotted that down in my personal notes. Fine! Never thought about it again. Had no intention of writing anything about cake. 

And then one day, because I was writing this other story about people connected to the Caribbean, this came up. It ends up becoming a symbol of so many things: cultural inheritance, sisterhood, family bonds. And more importantly, there was an undercurrent in this story that had to do with how our identities as individuals, families, and cultures are shaped not only by the stories that we tell but by the stories that we don't tell. 

GR: There's been a mainstream dialogue in the past two years about cultural appropriation of food and who owns a recipe. And I wondered, Were any of these political discussions on your mind when you were writing Black Cake? 

CW: I don't know that I was thinking that specifically about other people's conversations, but let's just say that other people's conversations included my own thinking. One of the things I've always thought about is the idea that, when it comes to food, often what we think of as traditional is not as local or as specific to us—"us" being anyone—as we think. 

With black cake, you're talking about a dessert that is beloved in a certain region and represents joy and togetherness and celebration. And it's really, really tasty. But it’s also the descendant of an entire history that isn't always recognized and which includes colonialism and forced labor of various kinds. This cake is an example of many stories we don't talk about. And if you're sitting together, and you've made a cake with people you love, and you enjoy the traditions, and it's today, it doesn't really matter. But when you think about tradition, what are you really thinking about? Whose story is it really? 

And that's what I love about fiction. The idea that we can talk about specific aspects of our lives without having all the answers. One of the questions is: How are you shaped by the fact that you haven't acknowledged that whole part of the story, or you weren't told the whole story? That's what happens in Black Cake.

GR: Your book covers many painful topics, without being about any one exclusively. But it does get into colonialism, racism, violence against women.… It covers a lot of ground. 

CW: It really does. To put it another way, we could say that you have a number of different characters who, for different reasons, are struggling with other people's expectations and stereotypes of them based on the way they look, their cultural background. 

Most of the people in this book are perfectly comfortable with their sense of identity—they have a sense of who they are, and they're not trying to change it. But they struggle against other people's expectations of them. I think that's something that a lot of us can relate to. 

GR: We haven't talked about the fact that your book is being made into a miniseries, produced by Oprah. What's that like?

CW: I'm finding it hard to believe, but I'm just thrilled. It's a team I admire tremendously, including Oprah Winfrey, whom I’ve admired for years. Marissa Jo Cerar, who was a writer on The Handmaid’s Tale, will be the showrunner. She is just a phenomenon and a lovely person. It'll be interesting to see how they interpret the book because it will be an interpretation. I wrote the book, and then these other super-creative people are moving forward with that idea. They're starting their own conversation. 

GR: Did you celebrate?

CW: You know, I haven't celebrated a single thing! I've been overall stunned and also just thinking, "I need to do the work." I just need to keep reading and writing and be grateful that I had this opportunity. 

GR: What are you excited to read or what are you reading?

CW: I've had the good fortune to read Wahala by Nikki May, a British author. Another one by a British author is Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter by Lizzie Pook. The Maid by a Canadian author, Nita Prose. Another great book that I enjoyed is Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett, an American author. More recently, I finished The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Jeffers. I also read The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris. I read this really beautiful nonfiction book, which just won the National Book Award for nonfiction: All That She Carried by Tiya Miles. And earlier this year, I was thrilled when Taylor Jenkins Reid read my book and gave it a nod. I absolutely loved Malibu Rising—how she captures the surfing culture and also how she conveys what seems to be a pretty superficial crowd of partygoers and wealthy, beautiful people. But in fact, she burrows down into very personal stories of how to live well and do right by your family. I should be embarrassed to say that I'm one of the few people in the world who has yet to read Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney. 

GR: It's on my list, too. 

CW: So I've got this endless "to-read" list. It includes Hell of a Book by Jason Mott, which won the National Book Award. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. A Little Hope by Ethan Joella. One book I'd like to read is by Bernardine Evaristo, who’s written one of my all-time favorite fiction books, Girl, Woman, Other, which won the Booker Prize in 2019. Her new one, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, is not fiction, it's more of a memoir, but also a letter to creative people.

Everyone's creative, but when you do what people call "creative work," like writing or art, often you need to pump up your confidence level because there's a kind of presumptuousness involved in writing, where people don't immediately see the results of your work. And they also may not see the value. It's a combination of great discipline and gambling. I'm really curious to see what she has to say about her path in life, and maybe she’ll have a few pearls of wisdom to offer. 

GR: Speaking of pearls of wisdom, do you have some for anyone reading this who’d like to be a novelist someday? 

CW: Just sit down and write. Don't feel that you need to say, "Here's the novel!" before it becomes anything. Just keep reading and writing. Write in a notepad. It's cliché, but write on a paper napkin, if that's what you have. Give yourself time to let ideas flow and have respect for your thought process. Write anything that comes to mind at first. Then, as you come up with an idea, focus on that. Know that the process counts, like everything else in life.