My mother's your sister she's not your half-sister,' " she says. "Even more common than that is this idea of what I used to call half-siblings until my nephew said, 'Don't say half.' He said, 'There are no half-people. Jones says that the notion that a father can be a different person to two of his children rings true, even when you strip away the shock and melodrama of bigamy. She notes in the novel how common this situation actually is - so common that many churches have smelling salts for the widow who discovers at the funeral that she's not the only wife. And so when I thought about that and I mixed it with my own wonderings about my own family, boom, this came together and a story was born."
"We don't have that web of secrecy between us, but I've always felt that I had a sister just outside my grasp, and so I started thinking about this idea of sisters and secrets and then I was in a bar once with some friends having happy hour, and someone mentions one of those stories you hear all the time about a man dies and two wives show up at the funeral. They're my father's daughters and they have different last names and we live different lives," Jones says. They're about 10 yrs older than me, but they didn't grow up with me. "I do have a sister - I have two sisters. Which is not to say that it Silver Sparrow doesn't have roots deep in Jones' biography. I would like to say that my father is not a bigamist."
When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth. "When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. "It's funny," Jones tells All Things Considered's Michele Norris. While the book is fiction, that's an idea that can spark waves of curiosity from readers. And when these two secret sisters find each other and become friends, they lose as much as they gain in the process. The opening line of Silver Sparrow is, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist."Īnd while Dana, who narrates that opening, knows that she is not James' only daughter - that her mother is not James' only wife - Chaurisse does not. The one thing they share is their father, James Witherspoon, but even the way they know him is very different. Though they live in the same city, the sisters have different last names and lead very different lives. It is the story of two sisters, Dana Lynn Yarbor and Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon. Almost everything about Tayari Jones' new novel, Silver Sparrow, is cleaved into two halves.
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