Francesca Ekwuyasi yearns for stories about pleasure and writes searingly about pain

Francesca Ekwuyasi (https://www.ekwuyasi.com/) is a writer you read with the windows open. Her work embodies what it means to be attentive to life, in spite of the fact that, as she admits in this interview, “paying attention is overwhelming.” Francesca’s novel Butter Honey Pig Bread was one of the most critically acclaimed works of fiction in 2020. It’s a book that shows the deep love that motivates Ekwuyasi’s art, life, activism and writing. She expands on why she feels drawn to stories about pleasure, joy and reconciliation, and also why she’s driven to write stories that show us how to “love properly” and heal, even as the world is constantly ending. She talks about the lengthy, improvisational process of putting her staggering book together, how the book became so much more immersive through this process, and how she writes with the hope of understanding, or with the faith that the reader will work to understand. She talks about intimately knowing sisterhoods and wanting to write women’s experiences in the world, using the conventions of fiction to move, as she puts it, toward a ‘merging’ that is also an unraveling...