Wuthering Heights changed everything.

Without it, my life would be very different.

I first read Wuthering Heights when I was fifteen. The book was assigned in English Literature and I had a deep curiosity to read it. There was something about the word ‘Wuthering’ that intrigued me. I loved how it made storm and tumult incarnate; a so much more evocative word than merely ‘stormy’ or ‘wild’. I also knew that Emily Brontë was from my part of the world which piqued my interest. And then there was the powerful mystique of the Brontë family itself. I was broadly familiar with the legend – the precocious brood living on the edge of the Yorkshire moors; the devastating personal losses and the spawning of three literary greats under the one roof.

My anticipation to read the book was great. I began to read:

‘1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven’.

I can recite the opening paragraphs from heart, so indelibly are they marked on my cortex.

Nothing could have prepared me for Wuthering Heights. It was unlike anything I had read before and remains unlike anything I have read since. It subverts almost every convention by which readers are won over to a story. The heroine is killed off in the first third of the book. The hero is utterly unredeemed and irredeemable. In most books even the most extreme recalcitrant wobbles at the end – Cathy in East of Eden shows something bordering on heart and Kevin in We Need To Talk About Kevin evinces the first vestiges of remorse. But Heathcliff shows not the smallest sign of repudiating his vicious, unrelenting revenge. With the possible exception of Hareton Earnshaw there isn’t a likeable character in the whole book.

The violence is cruel and unremitting. The scene where the ghost child’s wrist is shredded against the shattered window pane was so viscerally shocking – and so unlike what I expected from a nineteenth century novel – that I literally did not believe what I was reading. I flipped the page back to be sure I had not misinterpreted. But no, there it is: foppish Lockwood with all his pretensions to gentility has a nightmare in which the ghost child of Catherine comes to the window, plaintively asking to be let in. Lockwood promises to do so, but instead of taking her hand to assist her is so terrified that he rubs her wrist back and forth on the broken window pane in an effort to shake her off; soaking the bed clothes with blood. And that was just for starters. Puppies are hung, wives savagely beaten, graves dug up and babies dropped from balconies in drunken rages. Virtually every taboo from incest to necrophilia features in the pages of Wuthering Heights.

Stylistically the book was challenging too. The religious zealot Joseph’s speech is practically indecipherable for someone who doesn’t have an ear tuned to the peculiarities of northern dialect. (Charlotte Brontë was so concerned by it that she tried to make the language more accessible in her 1850 posthumous edition). I found myself mired in so many male characters with similar names. Heathcliff, Hareton and Hindley were hard to keep straight from one another. Then there was my confusion over last names and first names: Edgar Linton’s nephew is named Linton Heathcliff. Catherine Earnshaw becomes Catherine Linton and gives birth to a Catherine Linton who becomes Catherine Heathcliff and then Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliff doesn’t even have two names: he uses Heathcliff for first and last name. To add insult to injury he wasn’t even given his own name, he was named by his foster parents the Earnshaws for a son who died in childhood. His son is named, without his knowledge, Linton Heathcliff.

Where Jane Austen invited me in and beguiled me so that I never wanted to leave her arch and cultured pages, Brontë seemed to throw up barriers behind her. Jane Smiley put it perfectly when she said that ‘Wuthering Heights is possibly the only English novel that ignores the reader so thoroughly, in such a European, even Kafkaesque way’.

Don’t be alarmed. Please — sit down. It’s very important that no matter what happens during our conversation, you move as little as possible. No, don’t get up. Please. You’ve got to listen to me.

There’s a book inside of you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

We’ve suspected it for some time, as you know. There was a time we believed that almost everyone had a book inside of them, but fortunately that’s turned out not to be the case. But there is a book inside you. No, we didn’t have to run any tests. There are no tests for this condition. When there’s a book inside someone, you just know.

Back when I was nearing graduation, and everyone was talking about their capital-p Plans for the future, there was one response I’d get over and over again:

“Wow, that’s so brave of you.”

At the time, it confused me. I wasn’t joining the army or going through recruiting for the FBI. I wasn’t even teaching for America.

I was planning to write.

Men We Reaped, by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, is a book about how place and home can shape lives indelibly. This memoir is a story of a grief so profound because those being grieved were cherished so keenly. It is a remembrance of five black men who died too young, and a chronicle of how a family grew together and fell away from one another but never came truly apart. Men We Reaped is a breathtaking book, one where both sorrow and song are palpable. The writing is as elegant as it is raw—a fierce declaration that Roger Eric Daniels III, Demond Cook, Charles Joseph Martin, Ronald Wayne Lizana, and Joshua Adam Dedaux will not be forgotten. 

Though she is busy on book tour, I had the chance to speak with Jesmyn Ward via e-mail about the expectations she faced after winning the National Book Award, the boundaries of writing truth, the savagery she and her family claim and much more. 

Did you feel a burden of expectations after winning the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones?

I didn’t feel a burden of expectations immediately after because I had a first draft of Men We Reaped already completed. Writing memoir requires such a different set of muscles, both emotional and craft, and this is another reason that I didn’t feel that burden. However, now that I’m returning to the novel, I’m definitely feeling the pressure of expectation. Nikki Finney told me to forget all of that, and to remember why I came to writing initially, so I’m trying to follow her advice.

Home and family are such abiding themes in your work. How do you define home and family as a woman, as a writer?

Family is a mutable thing. Home is as well. Our nuclear families fracture and break, so we remake them throughout our lives. As I learned from Hurricane Katrina, homes can fracture and break as well, and these too, will be remade. The home I grew up in will never exist again, and this is why I write so much about home, perhaps. Because I lost mine.