“I am really interested in the idea of choice, and what it means to really get to choose something … it hasn’t meant the same thing to everyone throughout time and across all communities.
The friction between the inside and outside perspectives is what makes Bennett’s work fresh. The novel, which the author worked on for “six or seven years,” presents her character with a different set of circumstances and opportunities, allowing her characters to fully explore their ambitions without pigeonholing them into stereotypes, creating spaces for the teens to bud into adulthood in a way that doesn’t verge on confessional but also strays away from victimization. Oceanside is loosely based on the town that Bennett grew up in, and the anxiety Nadia feels about her body is true to life - when Bennett was a teen, it seemed the worst thing that could happen to a young woman was getting pregnant because it closed the doors on the ability to escape. “I wrote this book and I thought ‘this is really a book that will speak to black women’ and so far it has, but people of all different races and genders and age groups and nationalities tell me how this book resonates with them, and that’s something I didn’t foresee,” Bennett said during a phone conversation from her Southern California home. After the first chapter, the story veers away from the expected tragic narrative of regret, and Bennett spins a story that is quietly anxious, vacillating from setting to setting in search of all the things Nadia is searching for, and the author treats the characters and their motivations with a lyrical tenderness that defies the expectations of how narratives about black life are supposed to be portrayed by writers and digested by readers.
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