In Conversation

This week we spoke to Jendella Benson about Hope & Glory, her debut novel about a British-Nigerian family in crisis.

Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.

(No spoilers, we promise)

NA: Tell us the story behind the story, when and how did your writing journey begin?

JB: The very first thing I ever wanted to be was an author. That was the very first thing. And because I'm Nigerian, and because we just feel like we have to be the best at absolutely everything, I wanted to beat the world record at the time, and 13 years old was the earliest that someone had been published in the UK. I was in Year 2, and I was like, “I'm going to beat that!” It didn't happen because I didn't finish, but also - what did I know about writing a novel in Year 2? What did a 7-year-old really know about writing a book? Absolutely nothing. So I tried it, I failed, and I kept trying to write books up until probably secondary school before I switched to wanting to be a journalist. And then I wanted to be a graphic designer, and then I wanted to be a photographer and then it all kind of looped back around when I wrote something for Black Ballad. 

Before I started working at Black Ballad, back when it was still a free blog, I was writing bits and pieces and a book editor actually approached me after reading something I wrote and asked me if I’d ever considered writing a book. That's when I started working on the book that would eventually become Hope & Glory.

But I think I've always written. It's like a compulsion and it used to annoy me because I studied art, and when we used to go on trips to galleries and we'd have to write about the art that we saw, my art teachers in college would encourage me to study English at university instead. My response was always “No, I'm an artist, let me be an artist!” so it's quite funny how I'm now embracing the calling. It’s clearly a compulsion. I can’t not write, if that makes sense.

NA: It makes perfect sense. You mentioned your Nigerian heritage and you associated it with wanting to be the best, but I’m particularly interested in what your parent’s thought about your decision to study art at university?

JB: You know what, I'll never forget a friend of mine who was also Nigerian. We were both in the same year at college and she wanted to be a fashion stylist, and I was studying fine art and textiles. I remember her asking how I got my parents to let me to choose those subjects, and the truth is, my parents were very chill; they kind of let me do whatever I wanted. I don't know what the cheat code is behind that, but my mum was very creative as well. She was really intelligent, she had a Master's of Science in Physics but she also used to do fashion and she even did a photography course when I was young - so maybe it was because she had those desires and she never really got to fully pursue them professionally. Maybe that’s why she allowed me to pursue art. But later on my dad told me that when I was very young, my mum apparently had a dream that I would be an artist. And you know how Nigerians are with dreams…

NA: Hahaa I love that! Fast-forwarding to your debut novel, Hope & Glory, in your own words, can you tell us what this story is about?

JB: So Hope & Glory starts off with Glory, who has been living her best life out in LA, and when her dad dies, she comes back to London. When she returns, she finds her family in chaos - her mum's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, her brother’s in prison, her sister’s in this questionable marriage - so Glory comes back to that chaos and decides to stay back to try and fix everything. In the process, she discovers family secrets, and everything goes awry before it gets better.

Ultimately, Hope & Glory is about family. It's about the complexities, the chaos, the love, the feelings of betrayal, and everything that comes with complicated family dynamics. On a very simple level, it's a British Nigerian family drama, but it's very much about the idea of family and what it means to belong.

NA: That’s a wonderfully concise summary. You started off by saying that the book starts with Glory, did the initial idea for this story also start with Glory or did you start with an interest in exploring family dynamics?

JB: It all started with Glory because, when I started writing this book, I was very much where Glory was in life. I was kind of going through that quarter life crisis where you're wondering what you’re doing with your life, and you're asking yourself a lot of questions. It’s also a time where you're looking at your parents through different eyes. When you're a child, we often have these idealised views of our parents, and then you get to adolescence and all of a sudden you and your parents are butting heads, and they can do no right in your eyes. But then you get to a stage where hopefully, you start to see your parents in the fullness of their humanity - knowing that there's good stuff they've done, there's not so good stuff that they've done, but hopefully appreciating them as whole people. So I think I was very much in that stage of my life.

It started with Glory and I was just writing about that feeling of not knowing what you're doing, but then also what that means family-wise, when factoring in obligations to your parents and siblings. Maybe it would have been a “millennial” novel about trying to find yourself, but her family became more central characters in the book, and so it blossomed into a novel about broader family dynamics.

NA: And once you settled on what wanted to explore in this novel, how did you approach the writing process? What did that look like in a practical sense?

JB: I approached it in quite an analytical way, and maybe that comes from my work as an editor. So I'm not one of these people who can just start writing. I think they call them pantsers – people who just write by the seat of their pants - I'm definitely not that person. So my process literally goes like this: a character comes to me and I'm trying to work out the character is and what their story is. Then I come up with a plotline for the book, and when I have this plotline, I then start to write with this plot in mind, and this idea of who the character is. That first part of the process is like pulling teeth, it’s the worst part, but when I have a first draft, I can then go back and I look at all the characters who appear in the story. The next step is then to try to flesh out the supporting characters – I think about each character’s fears, their hopes, their dreams, and I try to get a real three dimensional sense of who they are. I'm very plot driven with my work but at the same time, all the characters need to feel fully developed. So it's just about working out who these people are, how they react to these plot lines, and going back and forth until you’ve kind of got something.

NA: You can definitely see your process in your work. What I love about this book is that feels both literary and commercial in that it’s clearly plot driven, but you also really take your time to flesh out the characters and your scenes. I also admired your thoughtful exploration of grief, particularly with Glory’s mother, Celeste, who we meet on the brink of a mental breakdown. Why were you drawn to this subject of grief and why did you choose to explore it in this way?

JB: The idea of Glory losing her father was there from the beginning, but whilst I was in the process of writing this book, I lost my grandma and then I lost my mum. It was weird in that sense, like kind of a strange coincidence, but when I think about it, I feel like so much of the immigrant experience is about grief in different forms. As much as we can create this hero story about our parents leaving their countries of origin and traveling to create a better life for themselves, there's so much grief in that in terms of leaving your community behind, and in terms of starting again by yourself. There’s a lot that’s lost and sacrificed in that process of being in a hostile environment and building from scratch, and I think there are so many different types of grief that immigrant families experience, but for the sake of keeping calm and carrying on, they just kept pushing forward and that grief doesn’t get explored.

We can be guilty of thinking our parents don't understand mental health but that’s largely because we’ve had the privilege to really examine our lives in a way that maybe our parent’s generation didn’t. For a lot of them, it was about survival so it was literally make or break. So I wanted to examine the impact of grief in immigrant communities. It wasn’t a conscious decision from the start, but in deciding to base it around this British-Nigerian, first-gen/second-gen family, grief just became such an important part of that story. As I was going through my own grieving process, I wanted to understand what grief can look like for our parent’s generation, and how it can show up in families.

NA: That's such a beautiful answer. Thank you. And with all the different characters and themes you set out to explore, at what point do you stop writing and accept that the story is complete?

JB: For me, the first time that I send it to my agent or my editor, it needs to feel cohesive. The first draft is always nonsense, absolute nonsense. It's like you're telling yourself the story the first time around, and you’re trying to work out exactly what the story is so it doesn't make a lot of sense at that stage. The second draft is when I go back and I'm trying to tidy it up a little bit and iron it out before I send it to my agent. It's always good to get some initial feedback, and then from that point you’re just drafting and redrafting.

In terms of when it feels like it's actually finished, it's when all the edits start to feel superficial, like I'm just like moving words around on a page for the sake of it. The thing with writing, the thing with any kind of art, is that you can keep on fiddling and fiddling until you're dead. But you have to ask yourself if the story communicates what you want it to communicate in the most honest way. It needs to feel honest and it needs to feel true. As long as people can get what I'm trying to say, then I have to accept that there's never going to be a perfect sentence. At that point you just have to send it out into the world.

NA: And if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring author, what would it be?

JB: If writing feels like a compulsion, if it's something that you just know you're always going to do, then the fear of putting your work out there is almost redundant, because the compulsion will always be more important than how people might receive it.

Even as a published author working on my second book, there's always that fear of whether people will like my next book as much as Hope & Glory, but all my fears are reduced in the face of knowing that I have to write to feel sane. Fear just has to take a backseat.

Jendella Benson is a British-Nigerian writer and editor from Birmingham, now based in London. She is Head of Editorial at Black Ballad – the award-winning digital media platform and online community for black women in the UK and beyond. Her debut novel Hope and Glory was first published in April 2022 in the UK and the US, and her short story Kindle was published in The Book of Birmingham collection.

You can read an exclusive excerpt of Hope & Glory here.