Author Tayari Jones has overcome a three-year writer’s block and a life-threatening health battle to deliver her latest masterpiece, Kin, which has been officially named as the newest Oprah’s Book Club pick, per latimes.com.
It has been eight years since Jones captivated the literary world with her bestseller An American Marriage. The road to her follow-up, however, was anything but smooth. Plagued by a three-year delay and the onset of Graves’ disease, a serious autoimmune condition affecting the thyroid, Jones found herself struggling to connect with her original manuscript about modern gentrification.
The breakthrough came when Jones abandoned her failing draft and turned to “word doodling” in a blank notebook. What emerged was not a contemporary tale, but a story set in the 1950s Jim Crow era.
“I don’t write historical,” Jones admitted. “I’m a writer of my own era.” Yet, characters Annie and Vernice demanded to be heard. The resulting novel, Kin, follows their journey from a small Louisiana town through the hardships of the deep South, exploring themes of friendship, identity and the “code” of her own mother’s silent past.
The creative process was interrupted by a “thyroid storm” that landed Jones in the emergency room. The author faced high blood pressure, extreme physical exhaustion, emergency surgery, daily medication and radiation treatment following a deterioration in her eyesight.
Despite these hurdles, Jones completed the manuscript. Her editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, described the final work as “perfect,” noting that the shift from the contracted contemporary plot to a historical one was irrelevant in the face of such powerful writing.
Now that Kin is available to the public, Jones is at peace with the long interval between books. Reflecting on the pressure of fame, she noted: “I’ve learned what success can and cannot do for a person. You have to learn to be satisfied.”
With the “Oprah Effect” now behind it, Kin is set to be one of the most discussed novels of 2026.
