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But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. I think I can trace it back to when I was a little girl and my father came home late, after getting lost trying to give our housekeeper a ride home.A 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction “Since childhood, I have harbored a fear that prison would abduct the men in my life. Wrongful imprisonment and mass incarceration are topics that have “always been at the forefront in black communities,” Jones explains. “This is when I came to understand that what happens to Roy may be an ancient story, but there is a modern way to tell it,” she says.

The draft was solid, but I thought it was too familiar - it was basically a reboot of the ‘Odyssey.’ Roy was a man returning home after a tremendous battle, and all he wants is to find a faithful wife and a gracious house.” Then, when hearing the poet Claudia Rankine read from her book “Citizen,” the lines “What happens to you doesn’t belong to you. So then I rewrote the whole thing from his point of view. “Roy’s situation is so urgent that I just needed to hear his voice. “But writing about her didn’t seem quite honest,” she explains. In her first draft, Jones focused on Celestial. And she said to him, ‘Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about this wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place!’” She told NPR, “I overheard a couple arguing. The idea for “An American Marriage” came to Jones one day in an Atlanta mall. “The horror of this story lies in its banality: An innocent man, happily married, who does all the right things to succeed, is nonetheless sidelined to a concrete cell,” Stephanie Powell Watts wrote in the Book Review. Their stories unfold through the letters they write each other while he is in prison. 2 on the hardcover fiction list - traces the lives of Roy, a black man wrongly convicted of rape, and his wife, Celestial. TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH: Tayari Jones’s fourth novel “An American Marriage” - Oprah’s latest book club pick, currently sitting at No.