Twenty-Four Seconds From Now An interview with Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds is the award-winning, internationally celebrated author of books for children and young adults. These include Long Way Down, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and All American Boys, co-written with Brendan Kiely. He was in the UK recently on publication of Twenty-Four Seconds From Now, a tender, honest love story about sex, desire and curiosity. Darren Chetty interviewed Jason Reynolds in person for Books for Keeps.

Darren: When my niece was ten years-old I asked her to name her favourite author. She told me it was Jason Reynolds. I was delighted! I’m a big fan of Knights Of and your Track series.

Jason: It took a long time for the UK to take a risk on my work.  The critique was ‘too American’, which to me, felt funny, because I couldn’t understand if they were saying that the books were too American or too Black. Our cultures are so similar, especially like the urban environment. I mean, Brixton and Brooklyn!

You seem to write with great attention to the particularities, but the universal themes cut through.

The truth is, I don’t know if I could codify what’s making it work.  Honestly, I’m not sure, because I’m never not thinking about my work as books about Black children, Black American children. They’re the forefront of what I’m thinking about. Now, I would argue that youth culture is a culture amongst itself. Maybe we could argue that there’s a lopsided influence from the American side. We have no bigger export than our culture. American culture sort of dumped on everything in the world. But honestly, I try to focus on writing from the perspective and from the angle of a Black American child. But more so than that, I’m writing from the angle of a child that just has these sort of Black American details – cultural details and language and in food and family – neighbourhoods and things of that nature. But it’s always child experiencing what children experience.

Are you writing in conversation with the past?

I really like the idea of writing in tradition, as long as it’s not stifling. I can sort of pinpoint my time and my lineage, where I can see Jacqueline Woodson and, you know,

Rita Williams-Garcia and Christopher Paul Curtis. I look at those books, and they’re coming out of, like, Walter Dean Myers, Virginia Hamilton – in these traditions, right?

I loved Twenty-Four Seconds From Now.  How do you write honestly about teen sex without writing teen erotica? The book is about a young couple about to have sex for the first time.

The purpose of it isn’t to be didactic or to moralise. The purpose of it, for me is to entertain, but I have to do so being responsible about who my audience is. I just take it seriously, to at least be thoughtful enough to try to figure out how to make that entertainment applicable to the people that I’m writing for. And even though I want to write a piece of entertainment, I have to be aware of who I am in the space and who I’m writing for and about. That cannot be just dismissed. I can’t be so cavalier about it.

You chose not to include a sex scene…

There is something sociological and anthropological about me as a man and a heterosexual man, writing a heterosexual teenage sex scene that is very, very slippery and I just wasn’t willing to take the risk. It just seemed like an unnecessary risk to take.

Do you think that as a writer you have a moral responsibility?

I don’t think it’s as a writer in totality, I think I do as a writer for children. It’s very different to writing for adults, because the stakes are different. And I take that very seriously.  You hear writers of fiction say ‘I write for myself’. And just recently they started changing to, ‘I write for the child in me’, which is an important, important edit to that.  But you’re writing for yourself and you’re 45 years old, and then you wonder why the books don’t connect. I could probably tell you why the books don’t connect, right? So, the stakes are high, because if you’re not careful, these books can be harmful. The truth is I do think it would have been irresponsible for me to attempt to write the sex scene.

Neon’s mother seems unusually skilled in talking to him about sex. Did you consciously want the book to show healthy relationships?

In a lot of my work, there’s always a moment where someone says, ‘this isn’t true’, or ‘this couldn’t happen. This wouldn’t happen’. Usually those are the moments that actually did happen in my life. Most of the conversations in this book that feel aspirational, they really did happen to me. I was one of the kids that grew up in like, a really strange, progressive, kind of funky family where these conversations weren’t so icky, they weren’t so taboo and weird, it was more like, ‘let’s talk about all the things’.

I remember my mother catching me early in my sexual life, just opening the door and saying ‘whoops, sorry’, and then saying, ‘I hope you guys are being safe’, and closing the door. And of course, the girls were always like, ‘I’m mortified, and I have to leave now’. But my mother was never the kind of mom who shamed me for any of those things. It just wasn’t that kind of house. Those kind of ‘hidden parents’ exist. And it’s not because it was easy for her because it wasn’t. It’s because, she understood the damage that might be done if she acted like I was doing something wrong. I mean, I may not have been doing something that she wanted me to be doing, but I wasn’t doing something wrong.  And so, she handled it that way.

There’s a line in the book that really struck me. Neon comments on a teacher who tells him and Aria off for hugging. They joke about her not wanting to see Black people hold each other. This seems such a powerful idea; it made me think of Hollywood, American culture and children’s books. I read it as you giving your narrator some insight, but also having faith that your readers will have some insight themselves. Is that a fair read?

You know the film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt?  Small budget. It was written by Raven Jackson, who is a poet and a photographer who thenmade this film. And it feels like a film made by a poet and a photographer. There’s a scene in this movie where there’s a man and a woman who are having, basically, their final goodbye, like, it’s like a swan song. They live different lives. They were childhood friends. So, they have a final hug, and she just holds the camera there for like, four minutes, five minutes, and you’re just sitting in the audience, and at first you’re a little uncomfortable, and then you just hear the audience begin to sniffle, because of how emotionally breaking it is just to see these two Black people hold each other. Yeah, the same thing could be said of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock. See, it’s an hour long, yeah. Of us just there, yeah, in the party. Just our spirit, our bodies. It matters. It really makes me feel. I mean, it makes me emotional now, right? So, like, I do mean that. I do mean that people have a hard time. It’s such a rare thing to see. In Twenty-Four Seconds From Now nothing happens. There’s no actual plot. It’s just an examination of the interior world of a boy and his girlfriend. Is that enough? My hypothesis is that it is, that it should be, that this is special enough to be a TV show. But more importantly, it’s special enough to exist as it is. Like, they don’t want to see us hold each other. Why is that so bad, so wrong?

Dr Darren Chetty is a writer and a lecturer at UCL with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip-hop culture. He contributed to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, and has since published six books as co-author and co-editor. His book Beyond the Secret Garden: Racially Minoritised People in British Children’s Books, written with Karen Sands-O’Connor, is out now, published by English Media Centre.

‎Twenty-Four Seconds From Now is published by Faber, 978-0571390687, £8.99pbk.