Transforming Facts into Story: An Interview with Charlotte Gill
I’ve already fessed up to choosing books because of their covers, so I might as well admit to choosing them for their titles, too. The moment I saw the publication announcement, I knew that I had to read Almost Brown. As I expected, the memoir tackles the thorniness of growing up in between two worlds, but it’s also a dynamic history lesson, coming-of-age story, textured familial portrait, and journey from estrangement to forgiveness—all rendered with razor-sharp precision. I had the pleasure of speaking with author Charlotte Gill about her process of getting Almost Brown into the world.
KH: What was the catalyst that initially made you want to tell this story?
CG: I feel like I've always been carrying this story around with me. It feels like a quarter of a load, then half a load, then three quarters of a load, and then eventually it feels like you have enough material to begin working. If I had tried to write this five or ten years ago, it would have been a completely different story in many ways. Number one, my relationship with my dad was estranged for a number of decades, and I didn't really want to tell the story of our estrangement. I felt as if that was the beginning and not the end. Since we've put our relationship back together again, it's become an even more interesting thing to write about. Sometimes people use the rifts and the conflicts in their family as the centerpiece of the story, but that never was the center to me.
One of the other reasons is I felt like I could get started on the story during the pandemic. It just felt like a very intimate space to be creative in, and I can't imagine a more personal and intimate story than a childhood and family story.
Did you follow a particular writing routine?
I started my latest routine during the pandemic when everything was so unstructured. I had these big jobs lined up that I was supposed to go start, and then, all of a sudden I had six months in front of me where I had nothing to do other than read and write. I would get up and put on workout clothes really early in the morning. I'm not a morning person, but I would make myself get up at 6 AM and write for about three hours and force myself to not get too into the details but to make it a substantive, high concept, generative part of the process where I was just dealing with big chunks of whatever I was working on, and that ends up being the big structural stuff of a finished book.
Were there any other books that inspired you to write Almost Brown, either in form or content?
When I sit down to write anything, I'll see what is out there that people are writing about in that same wheelhouse. I tried to collect as many books as I could that dealt with multi-racial/biracial experience and immigrant experience. I looked for a particular kind of story that addressed this stew of ethnicity and belonging and identity, and I had a hard time picking them out from a bookshelf, but I knew that they were perfect when I came across them.
Good Talk by Mira Jacob is a graphic memoir that’s so funny and such a poignant treatment of interracial family life. I loved it, adored it.
I ripped through Raceless by Georgina Lawton in a day. Both of her parents are white, but she is Black. Her mother never told her about her biological dad, so she went through her whole childhood with this thick layer of denial in the family about what her parentage was like. It was a fascinating story.
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter completely blew my mind. She's an American historian who taught at Princeton. It’s just a stunning, stunning examination of the construction of race—in particular how white supremacy comes to think about itself. I had never read anything like it. It's such an amazing scholarly work. I just kept coming back to it over and over again, thinking about it as I was writing.
I'll definitely have to check those out. I'm always looking for books about the mixed experience. You describe your early childhood with incredible specificity. Did you interview your parents or siblings to gather more information?
I didn't formally interview anybody in my family, although we did have lots of informal conversations about moments that I wanted to make sure that I had experienced in a similar way, or I just wanted to get their take on how they had experienced it.
My mother and my brother were really helpful in that regard. I think it's almost impossible for two people to have the same experience in one household, even when they're standing right next to each other. My brother and I are twins, so we went through our whole childhood in lockstep but still had experiences that are just so completely, wildly different. My brother has a different experience of race as well because he's slightly darker than I am, and he looks more Indian.
I could have sat down with people and asked them all of my questions at once, but I didn't feel as if I would get the sort of answers that I was looking for which had to do with the details and how they were feeling.
In addition to personal history, you include history about colonialism and race. What was the research process like for that?
I'm a filter feeder, and that's exactly what I did for this book. It's what I did for my last nonfiction book, Eating Dirt. I just go. I start reading and follow the thread into the maze, and one book leads to another book. I read a lot of academic stuff written by scholars who teach mixed race studies, and that was very helpful. I read a lot of colonial history, what the British were doing in India, what the British were doing in Africa, a lot of the history of Kenya. I read much more than made it into the book.
There is no way to write about the land in the country where I live now without referring to what happened to the Indigenous communities that lived here before settlers arrived. There's no way to write about the United States without talking about the transatlantic slave trade. There's no way of talking about India without talking about the Raj. It's so knitted into our history that I don't know that we can say that we're living in a post-colonial era because so many people are living with the consequences of colonialism to this very day.
It can be surprising how personally impactful reading and writing nonfiction can be. Did you use any prompts or tricks to get over the more emotionally taxing moments during the writing or researching process?
I think when you're writing, it's never like, “Oh, I'm gonna go out one day and disclose everything personal I ever want to say about myself or my family or childhood.” I spent two-and-a-half years working on this book and would go into the places where I felt like I delayed writing certain scenes because they were a little much right at the beginning, but then I worked around them and filled in all the gaps and blanks to the point where they felt approachable. Then I would go in and add another layer, or say, “I don't think this is relevant; I'm going to take it out.” I realized that I wasn't necessarily ceding as much control as I thought I was because I was always going back in there—layering things or pulling them back.
Readers are super smart. They know exactly when you are hiding or when ego is getting in the way, so I wanted to give enough, but I also didn't want to unnecessarily burn people in my family or write from a place of bitterness.
How did the experience of writing Almost Brown differ from that of writing your last book?
Eating Dirt is all about work. It's a tree planting memoir. I was a manual laborer for almost twenty years. It has a little community all of its own, a little subculture all of its own, and I wanted to write about that because I had never read anything by somebody who had done that job. Everything in that book happened in front of a group—not public per se, but nothing was really a secret—so I wasn't really dealing with the sensitivity of material in the same way, and the storytelling style is very casual.
How does your process of writing nonfiction differ from writing short stories?
When I started my MFA, I had never heard of creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, which is how I describe the kind of stuff that I do now. One of my professors explained on the first day of class that creative nonfiction is a different kind of writing because you are taking factual events and converting them into story using all the techniques that you would use to write fiction. Because it feels like a story, something happens to the reader, and something happens to me when I read narrative nonfiction as well. You can make some really cogent, powerful arguments if you sneak it into a story.
Do you tend to pull heavily from your own life in your fiction?
I lean happily towards things that could never happen in real life—my last published story was about Bigfoot hunters. I just completely go in the other direction and have fun with it. Fiction will always be my first love.
What have you read or watched and enjoyed recently?
Have you watched 1000% Me? It's this W. Kamau Bell documentary, and it's just mixed kids. It is delightful! I felt really inspired by it, not because the subjects were saying anything unusual but because they were saying things that felt so familiar even though they're all under the age of ten.
I just started Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. It's beautiful, stunning writing. Not a word out of place. It’s primarily a story about her mother, grief, food, identity, all sort of stirred in together.
Did you have a particular audience in mind when you were writing Almost Brown?
I think most of us have an audience that we get up for in the morning, and that audience for me was multiracial mixed people because it doesn't matter what our ethnicities are—we have so many common experiences. I realize that we are a vast umbrella group with many divergences, but there's so many shared experiences that it’s uncanny. I wish I had had something to read that would have given me a sense that there's millions of people who also feel this way when I was younger—others who also have the experience of going out with a parent who looks nothing like you or seeing what happens when you try to get on an airplane. It becomes an interesting reflection of how we think about race in our society.
Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King's College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.