Krystle Zara Appiah
In Conversation
This week we spoke to Krystle Zara Appiah about Rootless, her debut novel about a British-Ghanaian marriage in crisis.
Interviewed by Nancy Adimora.
(No spoilers, we promise)
NA: I’d love for you to take us back to where it all began. What’s your writer origin story?
KZA: It's funny because I think I actually learned to read pretty late, I remember really struggling. But as soon as I could read, I remember just being completely enamored with stories and I used to make up these little imaginary worlds all the time. By the time I became a teenager I started thinking about writing novels and longer books because my ideas weren’t small enough to be short stories - they were always so big and expansive. So yeah, I guess my love for writing started pretty young. I eventually studied Creative Writing and English at university and I just kept writing the whole time.
NA: There’s obviously a difference between writing because you enjoy it, and pursuing a writing career. When you were a teenager thinking about writing novels, did you see it as a potential career?
KZA: I don't actively remember thinking that this could actually be a proper job for someone like me. But I wrote my first book (which I’ve never read back!) from the age of about 14 to 17, I think it was. So I definitely thought about expanding my ideas into books and I remember really enjoying it, but I don’t think I ever really saw it as a viable career. I’d always imagined it being something I did for fun on the side, like a creative outlet.
NA: And what did your Ghanaian parents think about your growing interest in writing?
*we paused to laugh*
KZA: Oh my gosh. Well, now they're lovely about it. At the time, they kept asking me what I was doing and everyone around me was encouraging me to go into nursing. I did actually try for a while, like I actually tried to go to nursing school, but then I quickly realised that I was way too squeamish and too emotionally invested. I just couldn’t do it. So it’s safe to say that my family weren’t on board at the start. They didn't really get it and they’d never seen it done before. But I guess I'm the type of person who doesn't need to see something done before I try it.
NA: And I’m so glad you tried it because now your beautiful debut novel is out in the world. What was the journey to Rootless? How did you land on the story and what inspired you to take it all the way to publication?
KZA: I think the idea was in the back of my head towards the end of university, but I was working on another book at a time and just hadn't given Rootless the time of day. That was until 2017. That year, I went on a family holiday to Ghana, and I hadn't been since I was like five and I didn't really remember it, but after that trip I just felt like I had to write this book. I knew the characters, I knew the story and it all began with this really clear picture of Efe on the train platform completely hysterical. That was the opening image, and when it came to me I was like, I have to figure out what's going on with her. Later on, it became more about Sam and Efe’s story as opposed to just hers, but that’s where it started and it’s definitely gone through a few different evolutions to become the story it now is.
NA: And how would you describe this story to someone who hadn’t read it?
KZA: Well originally, it was very much Efe’s story in the first couple of drafts. It was a story about someone who had moved from Ghana to the UK, who had quite a traumatic history and relationship to UK, and was just trying to find her feet. Sam was always there because he's a part of her life, but he wasn't taking up anywhere near enough space to begin with.
But now it's definitely become so much more about the love story at the heart of it. It’s about Sam and Efe, two people who are very much in love, but who essentially just want radically different things. And I guess that's become more of what it’s about – they’re both trying to find out what family means to them and what's important to them. They’re trying to create the future they want and working out if they're going to pursue their own dreams, or if it's worth investing in someone else's.
NA: It’s interesting that you didn't explicitly mention motherhood — Sam wants kids and Efe wants to focus on her career, and there’s something so refreshing about being able to explore this from the lens of a Ghanaian woman given the weight of cultural expectations in our communities. Why did you want to explore motherhood in this way and what pulled you towards this topic?
KZA: I guess for me it's really personal. Since I was a teenager I’ve always said that I don't want to have children. I’ve never felt like my decision on the topic was ever received particularly well and I’ve had some of the conversations that feature in the book. I remember getting to know Efe as a character and realising that this was something I could kind of explore through her. So it was very personal to me, but it also really made sense for her as a character. So I guess exploring motherhood, exploring being someone who doesn't want to be a parent and working out what happens if they give in to the pressure, I guess it helped me live out the experience through Efe and then see if it's worth changing your mind or not.
NA: Have you watched, This Is Us?
KZA: Yes, I have.
NA: Okay, so what I loved about This Is Us is that there was no hero and no villain. Everyone was three-dimensional in that they all had their flaws, and this story is very much the same. When you read about a marriage, the default response as a reader is to want to take sides so I’m wondering whether you were intentional about showing nuance and the various shades of grey.
KZA: What I really love about families, and stories about families, is that there often isn't a clear villain - every single person believes they're doing their very best. Like, even for characters like Maame and Paa who definitely cause a lot of disruption, they genuinely believed they were doing what was best for Efe. And I think it's just because people have an idea in their head of what they want your life to look like, or what they want your life with them to look like. So with Sam, I really wanted to show that he genuinely really cares about Efe and really wants a future with her. But ultimately, they don’t want the same things and so they will always keep clashing.
NA: A large part of the significance of this story is the fact that Efe is the one who doesn’t want kids and wants to focus on her career. If roles were reversed and Sam didn’t want kids, people might just shrug and move on. Were you trying to in some way comment on gender roles and norms within modern marriages?
KZA: In many ways, I was. In Ghanaian, and I guess wider African cultures, women are stepping up so much more. I always like to say that I come from a family of matriarchs - my mum is essentially the hero of the household. She’s just phenomenal, and that's why Rootless is dedicated to her. And I think with this story you really witness the skew in terms of what women have to do compared to what men have to do in a marriage, and what's expected. I think I was reflecting what feels very true to me based on what I’ve personally witnessed, whilst also showing that it's really unfair.
NA: I love that, and it came across so well. My next question is about your writing process – so you came up with the idea after a trip to Ghana, what was the process of sitting down to actually write the story? What did that look like?
KZA: Well I wish my process was slightly different because I feel like I wasted time.
NA: Oo let's talk about it because I think a lot writers can probably resonate with that.
KZA: So I basically wrote the first draft very quickly. I did it for NaNoWriMo, so I did 50,000 in November 2017 and left it for a few months before coming back to it around June. I think by then I had written what I think of as ‘draft zero’ and it was about 80,000 words. When I read through it, there were times when I kind of started a scene and hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to say, and then I just jumped somewhere else. It was really sporadic and bitty, and so I cut at least 60,000 words and started fleshing it out again. At that point it was still Efe’s story and it felt a lot cleaner, but then I figured out that Sam had half a story to tell and then I kept chopping and changing, and started and stopping, so the whole process took me up until the beginning of 2020.
NA: 2-3 years feels like a long time but it definitely doesn’t sound like you were wasting time – it sounds like you were giving the story the space it needed to develop organically instead of chasing a publishing contract! Eventually you found an agent and sold rights to this book – but before querying agents, you had to have believed that the book was finished. How do you know when a story has achieved what you set out to do?
KZA: In theory, you can make changes forever. But I guess, for me, I felt very satisfied with the story when it was eliciting the kind of emotions I wanted it to. When I got to the end of the writing process I felt like I had told the whole story. We know they’re broken, we know they’re in crisis, we know how they got here and all the lovely and beautiful stages of their relationship, and then we saw how it all started to go wrong. By the end of it, I really felt like I had witnessed the highs and lows of their relationship and so the story felt complete.
NA: Another aspect that made it feel complete was the fact that this story is set in both London and Accra. I really loved how Efe clearly came alive when she was in Accra and you really captured the spirit of what it means to go home and to feel at home. I wondered whether this was intentional?
KZA: Yeah, I think a lot of it for me was about wanting to celebrate Ghana. It was my way of showing how much I adore the country and I'm actually planning on living there part-time — it's still in the works at the moment, but the plan is to be there when it starts getting cold in the UK!
But yes, I think I just really wanted to celebrate it - all the quirks and the fun and just how incredible it is being there. For Efe, Ghana really allowed her to have that space to really explore who she was outside of Sam, outside of family, and to pursue things she hadn't pursued since she was a child. In London, she’d created a life for herself but being back in Accra was about giving herself freedom and more options – I was excited to follow her journey in Ghana because I really wanted to see what she would do with those options.
NA: I love that so much. And what do you hope readers take away from Rootless?
KZA: I guess I really hope that people who have strong opinions - whether that’s having kids or not, or being married or not, or living somewhere or not - really feel confident in making their voices heard. I want readers to feel like their opinions are worthwhile instead of kind of sitting on things or suppressing things. I want them to walk away knowing that it’s totally valid and OK to not want what everyone else wants.
NA: And if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?
KZA: I don't want to say something basic, like “read” because that's an obvious answer…
I think I’d say be open to your story changing, because it changes a lot when you're writing, and being too rigid in terms of what you set out to do might mean that you don't uncover what the story could be.
Krystle Zara Appiah is a Ghanaian writer and screenwriter, born and raised in London. She has a degree in literature and creative writing from the University of Kent. In 2020, she was one of forty writers selected for the London Library's Emerging Writers Programme. She also works as a children's books editor. Rootless is her debut novel.
You can read an exclusive excerpt of Rootless here.
