Zinzi Clemmons on her first novel: ‘I’m proud of it, because I didn’t hold anything back’

What We Lose is a startlingly experimental and intimate debut, about a character whose complicated cultural identity reflects the author’s own

About five years ago, Zinzi Clemmons’s mother’s health worsened dramatically, and doctors told her she didn’t have much longer to live. Clemmons, who was away studying, returned home to Philadelphia – a detail she says “is highly relevant because of what’s going on right now [with healthcare in the US]”, as it was partly an economic decision: “I acted as her primary caretaker, and my family wouldn’t have been able to afford that unless I had done it. And we’re not badly off in any way.”

At that point, Clemmons was working on a story about HIV, exploring illness and its politicisation – themes that remain in her mesmerising debut novel What We Lose – but she didn’t have “enough direct experience”, and it wasn’t working. At the same time, she had started writing vignettes about illness and anticipatory grief, born from “the idea that I would have to go through this process very soon”. At the encouragement of her agent, she turned them into the skeleton of her first novel.

What resulted was a transgressive and moving study of grief. Centred on a young woman, Thandi, who is dealing with the illness and subsequent death of her mother from cancer, What We Lose is highly experimental, told in intimate vignettes including blogposts, photos, hand-drawn charts and hip-hop lyrics. Jumping from Philadelphia to Johannesburg, Portland and New York, Clemmons’s debut is also a meditation on identity, race, politics, family and love.

Clemmons’s mother died around the time she started writing it. “I think it’s maybe better that way,” she says. “It’s a difficult thing writing about your family – I probably would have held back … and I think that’s why I’m proud of it, because I didn’t hold anything back.”

The clear emotional insight with which she maps Thandi’s grief is remarkable. She says she wanted to focus on the surprising complications that come with grief – as, for instance, with sex: “You think, when you’re going through grief, that everything else in your life stops. And [sex] is one of the areas where you feel conflicted, because it’s self-indulgent on a very basic level and you’re giving yourself pleasure when someone has just gone through a lot of pain.” She says she gets asked about this “almost uniformly” by women journalists: “I think it’s because a lot of the bad writing we read about sex is written by men, but when women can talk about sex honestly, it tends to look much less objectionable.” She laughs. “I’ve always written about sex. I think I’m kind of gonzo in that way.”

Thandi has been raised in an upper-middle class, majority white neighbourhood in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an African American father. She often goes back to the affluent Johannesburg suburb where most of her family lives (and Oscar Pistorius attended school down the hill). Much like Clemmons’s experiences growing up as mixed race and between cultures, she doesn’t feel as if she belongs in South Africa – where the violence terrifies her – nor in the US, where she is trying to fit in but is reminded by her peers that she isn’t “like, a real black person”. In the book, Thandi muses: “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless.”

Growing up in a similar suburb of Philadelphia to Thandi, Clemmons spent many summers in South Africa. “I never felt like I had a tribe that I could belong to without some qualification – ‘you are this, but’.” But this cultural situation has turned out to be useful for her fiction: “That kind of experience is what makes you a writer … I think all writers are outsiders, for some reason … They’re the people who kind of stand off to one side, they’re not participating, they’re observing.”

What We Lose distils how racism pervades relationships between women, in ways that can often be hard to articulate. Thandi has a conflicted relationship with her mother, who forces her to have her hair chemically straightened and cautions “that I would never have true relationships with darker-skinned women. These …

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