Reid interviewed students at Iowa, Arkansas and other universities. Plant, a scholar of Black literature, found more personal inspiration for her new book, ‘Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom for All.’ “To be honest,” she says, “what may have kicked off this novel was how, if my students had an opinion on something and I said, ‘Tell me more,’ they would all say, in the exact same way, ‘Oh my gosh, I hate telling about this.’ There was something so tender in that phrasing and how many of them would say it.”īooks A scholar’s inspiration for a book on racial injustice: Her brother’s life sentenceĭeborah G. While teaching at the University of Iowa, she developed an Agatha-like interest in the lives of her students, and also in their vernacular. Reid finished her novel at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “I’ve never slept better or written more productively than when I was there,” Reid says this was where she wrote her first chunks of “Such a Fun Age.” She moved there after her husband was offered a job she worked in a coffee shop, wrote articles for a local magazine and fell in love with this walkable and livable college town. Reid, 37, chose Fayetteville for both personal and practical reasons. But as Millie sheds her natural cautiousness, she becomes reckless, both in her sexual explorations and in the way she treats the students she’s meant to be overseeing. Much of the plot is propelled by Agatha’s own curiosities and her carelessness, which derive from being both white and relatively affluent. “Come and Get It” is set in a dorm for transfers and scholarship students at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. “We are all that person in Target, having a panic attack but buying stuff because we feel bad,” Reid says. One of her student characters, Kennedy, learns from her mother to assuage her fears by filling her dorm room with useless goods. “I’m terrified of the ability that we have to fill our homes up with stuff that we don’t need, and the ability of capitalism to convince you that you need things and that if you buy something, you can run faster or think better, be stronger,” she says. ![]() (She is speaking from her home in Ann Arbor, where she lives with her husband and toddler and teaches at the University of Michigan.) “I wouldn’t want to do it,” she says of dealing with these issues as a college student now. While that induces its own anxiety, what seems scarier to Reid is always communicating through screens and social media. If someone owed you money when I was in college, you would have to remind them face to face.” “There are the linguistics, like when a noun easily becomes a verb like, ‘I’ll Venmo you,’ but also the way. For instance, technology has changed the way people communicate about money. “I’m very interested in how money guides relationships between people,” Reid says. Through these students’ interviews with Agatha Paul, a professor who writes about money, Reid unpacks the unsettling dynamics of college campus capitalism. Millie is working hard to save up to buy her own house after college, no matter how small and in need of repairs her white classmates have money to burn and often do, while their parents effortlessly replenish their accounts. “Come and Get It” is “about buying things and how we spend our money,” Reid says. “My characters are worried about crushes and rent and jobs, all while being Black.” “Frankly, it’s racist to require Black people to only write about race and teach you something,” she says over a video chat. In her new book, Millie Cousins is an RA in a college dorm, where she is one of only a few Black students and where casual racism stalks the hallways.īut Reid is frustrated by that perception. ![]() ![]() Her first novel’s protagonist, Emira Tucker, is a 25-year-old Black woman who encounters trouble while working as a babysitter for an affluent white family and dating a white man with suspicious motives. These days, Reid takes on her more adult fears in her novels - first her bestselling 2019 debut, “Such a Fun Age,” and now in its follow-up, “Come and Get It.”Īt first glance, it might appear that Reid’s fears revolve around race. When Kiley Reid was a child, she liked a good scare in her books, “Goosebumps” style. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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