JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Becoming a parent can transform every relationship in your life, even the ones that feel essential and unbreakable. It's what we see play out in Naima Coster's new novel, "Take What You Can." It centers on Val and Milly, who have been best friends since a formative college trip to France. Both women feel motherless. Later, they wind up pregnant at the same time and try to start new lives near each other in Brooklyn.
NAIMA COSTER: I wanted to write about Milly and Val navigating their first year of motherhood. They're both missing their mothers for different reasons, and they acknowledge that longing in one another, and it's what first forges them together. But it's not enough to keep them close.
SUMMERS: The novel explores how friendships can sustain us and sometimes bend under the weight of the different lives we build. When I spoke with Naima Coster, I asked her why she decided to explore Milly and Val's story through different cities and different timelines.
COSTER: I think I don't know how to write a book another way.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
COSTER: Maybe my challenge will be writing something more straightforward in the future. But I'm interested in the way that the past is always with us, even in the present time, how its imprints are in current moments. And I think it's really interesting to see the ways that moments speak to each other across time, and that's possible in a novel in a way that I think is harder when you're in the present, living your life.
SUMMERS: It's so clear over the years that span their relationship how much Val and Milly love each other, but there are also these moments where their friendship feels, frankly, a little toxic once they're back living in the same city again after time apart. Where does that sort of tension and friction and sharpness come from?
COSTER: I think that that tension and friction between them really comes from what they're each carrying that they have trouble articulating to each other. So Val, I think, has a lot of resentment that Milly has done better for herself in terms of finances, that she's wealthier. And Val can't really give voice to the ways that that highlights her own lack, and so she can be mean to Milly because she has trouble being honest about that. And Milly is a successful influencer who started her career as a travel blogger, but she's done very well for herself. She's someone who is so accustomed to putting on a good face, both for the people around her and for her followers on the internet, that sometimes she isn't authentic with Val and can't really say that she's still grieving her mother 14 years after losing her. So I think that there's a way that both of the women try so hard to keep things together that what they end up doing is pushing each other away.
SUMMERS: Naima Coster, motherhood is such a key theme in this book, and I know that you've talked and written openly about your own complex relationship with your mother. Would it be OK if I asked you to tell us about it briefly?
COSTER: Yes, I became estranged from my mother shortly before my last novel was published. And I'd been writing around estrangement in my earlier novels, and I wanted to write a book that really dug into the grief of that experience. There's been a lot of conversation lately about people going no contact with their parents for seemingly no good reason and it being sort of an act of defiance. And my experience of estrangement has been one that's quite sad and one in which the pain of it is really ongoing. And yet I'm able to go on living and make new memories and grow and change as a person and have beautiful experiences with my chosen family. And I wanted to write about the bittersweetness of that, of the ongoing feeling of loss but also the gratitude that I feel for what I have been able to hold on to.
SUMMERS: You also wrote that the very fraught mother-daughter relationship in your first novel was not a complete mirror of your own relationship with your mom. You wrote that it was more wish fulfillment than an exorcism. I wonder. This book, does this novel feel like more of an exorcism for you personally, or is it some other kind of experience entirely?
COSTER: I think that it is both exorcism and wish fulfillment. Wish fulfillment because I would love to return to France and eat all the food that is in this book and swim in the bodies of water that are in this book. But it is an exorcism in the sense that there's so much struggle that mothers have that goes unseen. And writing a book is a way to bring people close to an experience that is often private. In this book, there's writing about experiences of abuse. And there's something in writing a novel that I know makes me feel less alone and that I hope makes readers feel less alone as well.
SUMMERS: There are so many beautiful quotes in this book, but one that stuck with me about mothers was something that Milly's mother-in-law tells her after she gives birth. She says, a mother, you know, is the one who holds everything together. But as we've been discussing, as you explore in the book, that isn't always the case. Say more about that moment.
COSTER: It's a moment where Milly is struggling after giving birth to her daughter, and her mother-in-law can see. And Milly doesn't want to admit that she's having a hard time. And I think that the book really looks at the difficult feelings and desires that can come up after having a child. Both women experience joy, but they also experience rage. They experience envy. They experience despair and desire. And I wanted to write that onto the page because it's something that I certainly talk about with my friends who are mothers at length but I haven't read enough of in literature.
SUMMERS: Shifting gears a bit, there's another part in the book where Milly is telling an old friend how, as an influencer, she gets all this hate from strangers online. They suggest she's fake, she's ugly, she needs to be put in her place. And she tells the friend it's because nobody wants to see a Black woman get what she wants. Say more about that.
COSTER: I think that Milly is a compelling character because she has really built an amazing life for herself, and she can seem like she has everything and thus should not expect more. I think that we have a culture that expects women to be content with what they get, even when it's unequal, even when it is insufficient. And I think that's especially true for women of color and Black women. And Milly is keenly aware that her success, her confidence and her sense that she deserves good things is threatening to people who are really invested in a hierarchy where Black women are not at the top or near the top. And it's certainly a part of the hatred and backlash that she gets online. And she's aware of the way that her success bothers others.
SUMMERS: What do you think it is that Milly and Val, both of whom identify as Black women, want the most throughout their friendship?
COSTER: That is such a good question. I think on one level, what both women want is to be primary in somebody else's life. Like, Milly wants to be the most beloved person to Val, and Val wants to be the most beloved person to Milly. And I think that that comes from the mother hunger that they both share and having lost that kind of unconditional deep love of a mother or, in Val's case, never having known it. And I think that by the end of the book, what they simply want is to know that the other person is never going to go away and is going to stick with them. And they might not always be able to be primary to one another - they can't always come first - but they can remain connected through all the phases of life.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with author Naima Coster. Her latest book is "Take What You Can." Thank you so much.
COSTER: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS YORK AND ANTHONY HAMILTON SONG, "ALONE A LOT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
