Author Renée Watson on ‘skin & bones,’ her first novel for adults

Renée Watson has topped bestseller lists and won multiple awards for her children’s and young adult literature. But the author, who splits her time between Portland and New York City, recently released “skin & bones,” her first book for adults. The story follows 40-year-old Lena Baker as she navigates dating, fat-shaming, friendship and motherhood while also working to bring Oregon’s Black history to the general public. The book also deals with grief, faith and the things we pass from one generation to the next. Watson joins us in the studio to talk more about her adult fiction debut.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Renée Watson has topped best-seller lists and won multiple awards for her children’s and young adult literature. But her new novel is for adults. “skin and bones” came out recently. It follows 40 year old Lena Baker as she navigates dating, fat-shaming, friendship and motherhood while also working to bring Oregon’s Black history to the general public. Renée Watson splits her time between Portland, where she grew up, and New York City. She joins me now in the studio. It’s great to have you on again.

Renée Watson: Thank you for having me.

Miller: What was the first kernel of this new novel?

Watson: The first kernel was the scene where Aliyah ‒ the daughter, who’s eight years old ‒ is playing with her dolls, and she is saying some pretty inappropriate things that a child probably should not say. And her mother is like, “Where did you learn that from?” And the daughter is like, “You. I’m listening to you when you talk to your friends.” That was the first thought that came in my mind about these characters, and thinking about what do adult women pass on to younger girls about beauty, dating, love, relationships. And from that little scene of this little girl soaking up all of everything that’s coming from these older women, the story grew from that.

Miller: You’ve spent your career writing books for young readers, in ways that don’t talk down to them. I mean, you treat them with respect, you treat them like full-fledged humans, meaning a lot of things, but meaning that you also talk about things that maybe in the past, some people would have thought of as adult issues – of class and race and pain and trauma and joy, and everything. Which is what we’ve talked about in the past when you’re on. But given that, I’m wondering how different it was to write a novel for adults, given that you’ve already been treating your readers like serious people.

Watson: You know, I wanted to continue that conversation that I’ve been having with young people for over a decade now. I wanted to now speak to the mothers and aunties and teachers and mentors who are raising these young people that I’ve been writing for and in conversation with for the last few years. So I think I was bringing that same curiosity, and the same respect to the adult reader, and just wanting to have a conversation about what has been left to us that we want to pass on, and what’s been left to us that maybe we want to stop passing on in regards to beauty standards, lessons on forgiveness, love, all of those kinds of things. So, yes, I think I’m the same writer having very similar conversations, but maybe a deeper one with the adults in the lives of the young people that I’m writing for.

Miller: What do you think having an older audience in mind gave you license to do?

Watson:  It definitely gave me license to play more in the messiness of love and the complications of relationships. I think when I’m writing for young people there’s a little bit more neatness of relationships, and how to navigate those complicated relationships. But here, I didn’t have to close things up so neatly. I could leave things open-ended and trust that the adult reader doesn’t need a happy ending or every kernel of the story to be closed. I think I also was able to play a little bit more with format and experiment with language in a way that I haven’t quite done yet with young adults.

Miller: Was that exciting in terms of craft?

Watson: It was very exciting! In terms of craft, it was so exciting to think about… what do I want this book to look like and feel like? So I moved the margins in and literally put this woman’s story who is usually in the margins – she’s marginalized, because of her size, her color ‒ and her story takes front and center in the book. I also wanted the book to feel like a metaphor of her squeezing herself into a space not made for her. So when you read the book, you’ll see the text looks different than what a traditional novel, from margin to margin, looks like. I was able to play a little bit more with this text than I have in my work for younger readers.

Miller: When I think about playing with margins, I think about making it so a paper in high school is going to be longer than it would have been otherwise. And you do that because you’re a dumb 17-year-old, but you have the ability as a writer to say to your editor or your publisher, “I want you to put the book this way,” and they say yes?

Watson: Yes, I wrote it this way. So in my Word document when I was working on the manuscript, I moved in the margins, I wrote in the center of the page. I knew that I wanted the story to kind of flow more like vignettes and not a full narrative. I just wanted it to feel like Lena’s thoughts and contemplations, not so much of me, the author, telling you a story about her. But you, really being in her head, and how she’s thinking. So I needed it to move fast in that way, and we turned it in just like that to the editor, with a note explaining why I hadn’t made this choice and asking that this choice be respected. And they said yes. So it wasn’t even anything I had to really advocate for. I think they got what I was trying to do.

Miller: Do you mind reading us a passage? One of the chapters in this, it’s called, “Questions,” and whatever setup you think it needs.

Watson: Sure. “Questions” comes at a moment when Lena has made some promises to her daughter about how they’re going to spend summer vacation. And she has kind of fallen into this sadness, and isn’t able to do the things, and keep the promises that she’s given her daughter. And she’s also wondering, how can she answer some of her daughter’s questions? Kids ask big questions and she’s trying to figure out, does she even have the answers to questions like these?

Watson [reading]: “Questions. My daughter wants to know if she will ever have a daddy. A real one. My daughter wants to know if I will ever stop crying myself to sleep at night. My daughter wants to know if I want to keep one of her teddy bears with me at bedtime, so I won’t be so sad. My daughter wants to know if we are going to Seaside Beach before summer ends, like I promised. My daughter wants to know why I keep saying, ‘We’ll go next weekend,’ and never go. My daughter wants to know why she can’t have potato chips for a snack. My daughter wants to know why I flushed all the sugar we had in the house down the toilet. My daughter wants to know if all men hurt the women they love.

My daughter wants to know if Malcolm is really sorry. My daughter wants to know why I want to forgive Malcolm. My daughter wants to know if she has to forgive people when they apologize. My daughter wants to know if I ever did anything so bad that I didn’t deserve forgiveness. My daughter wants to know if I will come outside and play with her in the backyard like I used to. My daughter wants to know why I am drinking smoothies and not eating meals. My daughter wants to know if all girls and women dislike their bodies. My daughter wants to know if ‘fat’ is a bad word. My daughter wants to know if she is fat. My daughter wants to know if I think she looks just like me. My daughter wants to know if I think she’s beautiful.”

Miller: That’s the award-winning writer, Renée Watson, reading from her latest novel, her first for adults. It’s called “skin and bones.”

So many of those seemingly simple questions are so big. I mean,  in some ways they are the basis of an entire novel or a dissertation. One of the ones that stands out to me now is, “Is ‘fat’ a bad word?” It’s something that your adult characters pretty literally reckon with at various times. How have you come to think about words that can, and still are, wielded as weapons and have been reclaimed with pride, simultaneously?

Watson: You know, I think what I wanted to explore in this novel is the nuance of people who belong to a group, and how you can have people who all identify as something, and still have very different perspectives on how that should be expressed. So you have these three friends who are all plus size women, they’re all big, and in their bigness, they’re different sizes. Lena is the biggest, her friend Kendra is right under her, and then Aspen is the thinnest of the biggest.

And they are exploring this word, “fat.” Is it an insult? Is it okay to say it? How do you reclaim something that was never yours anyway? Is that reclaiming? So they’re asking that question often in the book, and I think Lena is in the middle of, ‘Yeah, I understand why I can say it, and it doesn’t mean anything negative.’ There’s no negative connotation to it. Aspen is completely body positivity, “Claim the word, say it, be proud,” and Kendra is very, “Uh, no, it’s a negative word. It’s never meant as a compliment and I’m not saying it.”

So I just wanted to have that conversation and, as the writer, be out of the way of my opinion, but just thinking about, can we have a conversation about language, what we say, and the weight, literally, the weight that comes with our words. When I was a child, fat was never said as a compliment. It was like the thing no one wanted to become. And so it’s interesting to have these characters, who are dealing with each other in their bigness and also with thin women in their work lives, using the word as a compliment and also as an insult and also as a fear of, “I don’t want to become that.” “But you’re beautiful the way you are, but I would never want to be that big.”

Miller: And that “but” is an important word. Despite that, you’re still beautiful.

Watson: Exactly. And Lena, as the main character, who is a Black woman growing up and living in Portland, Oregon, is constantly in that area of, “But.” She is Black but smart. She’s fat but pretty. And so she’s constantly having to navigate what it is like to own who she is, and not feel like she has to make disclaimers or statements about her identity, where she can just be and exist, without explanation.

Miller: One of the richest parts of this novel for me is that “at but beautiful ‒ the idea of that message coming not just from society, but coming from the people who mean the most to you, coming from your family. That’s one of the things you explore a lot in various ways, intergenerationally, in the book. What did you want to explore in terms of the way, within families, fat is talked about?

Watson: You know, it’s the one thing that is just so acceptable to critique of someone. In our culture it is very acceptable to just make a comment about someone’s weight. “Wow, you’ve put on weight.” “Oh, girl, don’t get too big now,” or congratulating a thinner person for now having hips. I think, especially young girls who are growing up in households where their bodies are always the subject matter of dinner conversation, I wanted us to think about the damage that that can do, and how we can expand the word beautiful to mean something beyond just what someone looks like. And think about what we’re teaching – I say often, our young girls, but what we’re teaching everyone – about body and beauty, and is it okay for me to comment on what you look like, and why do I feel that that’s okay?

Lena is thinking about what her grandmother and her mother has said to her in her presence about her body, and she’s also thinking about, “Oh no, I’m also doing the same thing to my daughter. How can I change that and pull back, and what’s the new normal in our family, of not putting so much emphasis on a person’s size, but who they are, the essence of who they are?”

Miller: You have a number of scenes where characters in their thirties and forties or so, are having tense moments or sometimes arguments with the generation up ‒ with their parents’ generation – people in their sixties and seventies. Can you give us a sense for the kinds of actual conversations you’ve had that informed that? This is a theme that, here and there, runs throughout the book in various contexts.

Watson: Yes, I think there’s always… I’m in my forties, and I’m in that place in my life where I have elders above me who are pouring into me such great wisdom and mentorship and love, and also critiquing this generation. Our music, our parenting style, all the things. They have something to say about the way that we’re doing life. And I’m also of an age where I can look down at a younger generation and say “their music, the way they’re doing things..

Miller: …You’re now saying “kids these days” to the ones below you.

Watson: Exactly. And so I wanted to put on record and in a book those very real moments when you know this person loves you, and they’re also critiquing you, and what do you do with that? What do you take from that? I think there’s a lot of conversations around the grit of a generation who didn’t have a lot of podcasts and self-help books and all these resources, and phrases like “self care, self love, Black girl magic,” to rely on. They figured out how to survive very hard times. And I think sometimes that resilience and that grit is admirable and it’s something we long for, and we’re very proud of as a people.

And also I think there’s room for “well, maybe you shouldn’t have had to carry that whole burden by yourself. Maybe it wasn’t right for you to have to figure it out by yourself.” So I think we’re also in the book thinking about the balance of, when are you just, “yes, you gotta take it on and figure out how to make a way out of no way because that is what your ancestors did.” And then there are times where “yes, we need to just go to the beach for a weekend and deep breathe and do some yoga and have some sisterhood time together.” There’s a balance in that that I’m trying to play with in the book, where I think these two generations are sometimes on opposite ends of what it means to self care, what it means to love, and what it means to be revolutionary, too. I think there’s a disagreement between the generations around the history of Portland, what it means to take up space as Black women. And so they’re debating and talking about that.

Miller: In one of those scenes, the narrator says that she’s glad that her white coworkers weren’t there to watch this constructive debate between long-time and older Black Portlanders and some newcomers who came from, I think they say, Chicago or L.A., and the elders basically say, “You’re acting like you know what’s happening here, but you’ve just been here briefly,” and then she says, “I’m glad that that my white coworkers weren’t here, because some conversations are only for family.” Family, I take it there to mean Black people. How do you think about this issue as a writer? I mean, about how much to share with a general audience that is going to include white readers, like me, for example?

Watson: You know, I love this question. I always say I’m writing first and foremost for Black folks. That is who I have in mind when I’m writing.

Miller: Black girls most particularly, you said.

Watson: Black girls, yes, for sure. And I think of it in the way that my mother prepared meals for her family. She was cooking for her babies, her children, for me to have food and nourishment and to sit at the table and talk about my day and engage with her. If I had a friend over, they could sit at the table and eat with us too, so the meal was also for them. But she was cooking it with me in mind. And that is how I see my work. It is for my people, and everybody is welcome to the table, and I want us at this table, to eat and dine and conversate and talk about the issues that come up and figure out, who are you in this book? And who do you relate to? Not just because you look like them or you come from where they come from. But the feeling and emotion.

I think that’s the power of storytelling, is that you don’t have to look like Lena or have these same experiences. But if you know what loneliness feels like or heartbreak or the fear that you’re doing it wrong, that you’re raising your child and you’re like, I have all these questions, I don’t know if I’m doing this right, then you relate to Lena. And I think that’s the power of storytelling.

Miller: You’ve said, really beautifully, that’s why you relate and learned so much from Ramona, a girl who didn’t necessarily look like you, but inside, you were very similar in your rambunctious childhood.

Watson:  Absolutely.

Miller: I want to turn to forgiveness. It’s another one of the themes that is embedded in so many of the different relationships that Lena, your main character, has to navigate. What did you want to explore in terms of how forgiveness works, what it means, who it’s for?

Watson: I think forgiveness is work, and I don’t know that we talk about it in that way. I don’t think it’s a one-time thing. I think you have to work at being a forgiving person and a person who shows grace. I think you also have to have wisdom of who is worth that investment. And so Lena is having to question, “who is deserving of my time to work on this relationship? What friendships are kind of, okay, I need to let this go. This is toxic. This is actually not a healthy relationship.”

And then what are the ones that are worth fighting for? I think sometimes we can be so quick to throw people aside, or we stay way too long. And so she’s figuring out, yeah, there are some people who, time and time again, it’s worth having that conversation with, and working on the relationship. And then there are some people who you can love from a distance but you need to walk away from. And so that theme of forgiveness ‒ forgiving self, forgiving your parents or people who loved you the best they could, but made mistakes ‒ she’s also grappling with that. As now, a mother, she’s realizing, “Oh, I make mistakes and I love my daughter, so clearly my mother loved me while she was also getting some things wrong.” So letting go of that bitterness, too, is something that she’s coming to grips with.

Miller: You note in the acknowledgements ‒ at the beginning of your acknowledgements ‒ that your mother died just as you were finishing the first draft of this novel. Where do you see her in this book?

Watson: Oh, she is all over this book. I see her most whenever a character is offering grace. I see her most when…

Miller: What do you mean by that? By offering grace?

Watson: There are just moments where you could say something mean, or you could check somebody, but you choose not to.

Miller: That was something that she did?

Watson: Absolutely. There would be times when I would be like, “you should stand up for you, why are you letting them say this, or treat you this way?” And she understood what time does, and that time can reveal some truths, that nothing she could have said in that moment would have done.

I see her whenever Aliyah, the daughter who’s eight, is being loved deeply. Those scenes in the kitchen. She’s learning how to cook, and she’s just being nurtured and loved on. I think of my mother, not just to me and my siblings, but to so many young people. She loved kids and definitely was the nurturer of many young people. So she’s in the book in that way for sure.

Miller: Renée Watson, thanks very much for spending time with us. I appreciate it.

Watson: Thank you.

Miller: Renée Watson is the best-selling author of a number of books. Her latest novel is called “skin and bones.”

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.