We are watching this woman’s relationship with her mother change, and the tension inherent in that process is what drives the story. In “When My Mother Came to Stay,” that intimacy itself-that tenderness-is the propulsive quality. I worried that the intimacy of the story would come at the cost of narrative momentum, but this caused me to think about structure in an unexpected way. I’d never written fiction that stays with a single character for hundreds of pages it almost felt like too much freedom. Transcendent Kingdom is loose by comparison, and that looseness threw me at first. The notable historical events that often marked the passage of time from chapter to chapter offered another constraint, so while the book as a whole was sweeping, the chapters were narrow in scope.

Homegoing, structurally speaking, was quite tight-14 chapters, each set in a new time period with a new point-of-view character. Yaa Gyasi: I had hoped to find the writing process for my second novel easier, but instead I encountered new challenges. Can you describe the changes in the writing process that emerged while working with a narrower lens? “When My Mother Came to Stay” is a more intimate story concerning the relationship between a mother and daughter. Oliver Munday: Your debut novel, Homegoing, is a work of breathtaking sweep, spanning eight generations and two continents.

Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. To mark the excerpt’s publication in The Atlantic, Gyasi and Oliver Munday, a senior art director of the magazine, discussed it over email. “When My Mother Came to Stay” is taken from Yaa Gyasi’s forthcoming novel, Transcendent Kingdom(available on September 1).

Editor’s Note: Read Yaa Gyasi’s new fiction, “When My Mother Came to Stay.”

Gyasi transcendent kingdom