"I just wanted to write a book about regular black people. I feel like we — our culture — really loves historical black narratives, like whether it’s the popularity of slave movies or civil rights, black people only have resonant stories that already happened. There are rarely stories about black people that are set in the future, and people don’t really want to talk about Black people just living lives now."That’s one reason I like the new show Atlanta: It’s just like black people just talking. That’s not to say it’s not inflected by race, or it’s not framed or shaped by race, because life is inflected by race and shaped by race. But I really was interested in these characters whose main conflicts are not racism... We all live in racialised bodies, so we experience race in different ways. But that’s not to say the major conflicts of our life are necessarily racially based. Sometimes they are — and obviously, I’m writing from experience that is very different than writers who came before me."My mom grew up in the Jim Crow south, so the things I’m saying would probably sound crazy to her. She couldn’t try on shoes in a store because she was black: They had to take a piece of string and measure your foot and then take the string to the store. So something as casual as buying shoes was a racial experience [for her] growing up. I’m speaking from a different perspective in time; I grew up in a very racially diverse place and it wasn’t majority white, but it also wasn’t majority black."I just love seeing stories about characters who come from these different backgrounds. But that’s not the whole story. That’s not anybody’s entire life. It's the scale of being human: It encompasses so many different things, including race, including gender, including sexuality, class, all of those things. But it’s not restricted to that.""Right, exactly. I’m not a mom, but I feel like there’s so much pressure on what it means to be a mother, and I think that pressure is also racialised often. This idea of bad black mothers, that trope is weirdly common in culture. It’s inflected by class and a lot of other things, but that was something that I wanted to sort of take on, these mothers that are all very imperfect. But also I wanted to strive toward humanising them or making them not seem like these monsters.""Sometimes, with the books that I read, it’s like: Okay, this is intellectually stimulating, but it leaves me cold. I don’t want my book to do that. I want my book to just leave people feeling something. Whatever that is — if it’s anger at the character, frustration, whatever — I just want you to feel something.” The Mothers by Brit Bennett debuts October 11, 2016.