A few weeks before the launch of How to Be Unmothered, Camille U. Adams sat down in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to discuss her debut memoir. Trees feature heavily in her novel as a source of restoration and this selected meeting place demonstrated that intimate relationship with nature. In the interview, Camille discussed her memoir writing process, the limitations of Western genre labeling, and how her identity as a Trinidadian writer guides her voice and style. How to Be Unmothered is out now from Restless Books and can be purchased here or at your favorite independent bookstore nationwide.
Irina Costache: I’d like to start by asking you about something you mention at the very end of your book, in the acknowledgments, which is that you are proud of yourself for embracing disillusionment. Can you tell me why that was so key in your writing process?
Camille U. Adams: I am really interested in the ways in which people don’t experience cognitive dissonance and stay within entrapment and stay with abusive, narcissistic men and family situations that are so destructive for them, and don’t allow themselves to see these people differently. How do you avow this love from a parent when experientially, everything is contradicted? Like, someone says they love you but it doesn’t look like love, it doesn’t feel like love, the way they speak to you isn’t love, and you still, because you have this need (I mean, humans have a need for connection and community), you still maintain that and don’t allow yourself to have that break, allow that disillusionment, allow yourself to grow out of that, allow yourself to be estranged, allow your life to take a different path—that I can’t understand. And I see it within my sisters. I see it in everybody else, because I am totally the black sheep. But I wouldn’t have been able to write this book, I wouldn’t have been able to heal, I wouldn’t have been able to be strong, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything if I had not allowed myself to let disillusionment reign. I think that’s my superpower. I continue to be disillusioned.
One thing I really enjoyed about your book is that you very seamlessly switch perspectives between how you experienced things as a kid and your older, mature voice. What was it like finding that balance in writing both versions of yourself?
When you think on a craft level while you are doing creative writing, it becomes really inorganic. I know that I have done workshops where people have talked about the different ways in which you put different voices on the page. For myself, while I was writing, I discovered that a memoir needs to be like a multistrand braid, that it’s not just three voices or two voices, like the child self and the adult self. I would say that seamlessly while I wrote, my first audience was me. So, those moments when I’m pulling back, it’s me talking to me, or me gaining perspective. Writing this memoir, I had to go back. It’s not me recalling, I’m not doing it from a cerebral space. That’s not the voice that I employ at all. I’m going back. I’m there. And so sometimes I have to come out of the space to free myself from that, because trauma is a hard thing to revisit, but also to be like, “Oh, this is what this meant.” The adult has the words, has the vocabulary, has the psychology, has the empirical knowledge, while the child has the experience. And so putting those two next to each other is what informed me as the author at the desk.
Besides yourself, is there anyone else you were writing for?
Caribbean culture is lovely, powerful, and also secretive. Secretive in that there’s so much that we display, like, think of Carnival. There’s so much that we put out there, so much that we see, and so much that is also veiled. We don’t say these things, we don’t share our opinions, we don’t tell. Part of what I wanted to do was to break that and to use our forms, and to write for other people who have not been able to tell, who can’t tell, who won’t be able to, people who are dead, people who are being silenced, who are being abused. I am very Caribbean. America centers itself, and I am completely against that. I hate that in a colonizing, colonial, imperialistic, and neo-fascist nation, other cultures tend to be marginalized or peripheralized.
For me, writing for Caribbean people is centering them, because when I grew up, I read Caribbean literature. I didn’t read American literature until probably my third year. There’s this dominion that America poses and creates through its literature. I am in antagonism with that. That provinciality is purposeful because, if you don’t know about other stories, and if you don’t know about other genres and other arts and other craft forms, then you don’t know about other histories, other peoples, other perspectives, other understandings, other ways of being with the world. And that limits you. If you think that America is all there is, then obviously that is the means by which a country obtains power, right? So decentralizing power is very, very necessary.
I know you were inspired by the musicality of Trinidadian oration and that you wanted to be true to its grammatical structures. Can you tell me why it was essential for you to write your book with this structure?
Because this is a Trinidadian memoir. I want you to envision me sitting in a village square as a griot, having other people around, telling a story. I’m using the medium of a book, but I need people to hear it. Storytelling is our first form. It’s our first way of understanding the world, and we distance ourselves so much from it. Orality comes from land, comes from our history, comes from our ancestry, and all of that needs to be woven in. In Trinidad, we have such a strong oral culture, like our Calypso, our music, our Extempo, Carnival, all of these things. I am a Trinidadian woman, and so I can’t write something or tell something and remove that element. There is no way. It’s homage to the ancestors, to the people who’ve gone before me, to writers who’ve done this work, to storytellers that I grew up hearing, to the music, to all of those things that infuse my understanding of creativity.
The places in your book are so vivid, like the island, the road that you grew up on, and the rooms in your house. They are almost more vivid than the people themselves. Was this purposeful and, if so, why did you center so heavily on setting?
Because you have to be there with me. You have to be in this house of hell to understand it. I don’t want the reader to be removed. I don’t want the luxury of having this vicarious, voyeuristic experience while you sit in the safety of your home. I want you there, and to be able to be there, you have to understand what this place looks like. You have to not just see it, you have to feel it, you have to smell it, you have to have a total sensory immersion in this place. That was necessary for me. It’s also me actually organically relating myself to being there because I had to go back to the place, I had to walk the road, and those things are imprinted on you. The land imprints on you. So it’s a memoir of the land as well, of the house, of Trinidad. You have to see it. You have to feel it. You can walk it. You have to touch it. You have to hear it.
Too many times, especially with Black people writing, it’s like, “Oh, come your trauma for my consumption!” And I’m like, “No, we’re not doing that at all.” This is not trauma porn. There is trauma in it, but it’s not for your pleasure or your titillation or for you to just view it and remove yourself from it. No, not at all. Absolutely not. And in too many ways, the publishing industry requires that of some people, and then some people cannibalize themselves in doing that, and I think that’s highly problematic.
There are a lot of scenes in the book that are really imaginative, and I wanted to ask about what those scenes meant to you and what role imagination played in your life.
It’s not imagination, and that’s what makes it Trinidadian as well. It’s cultural, it’s another way of being in the world. In Western publishing, people tend to use this term magical realism, right? Where everything that isn’t physically tangible, unable to be perceived through those limited five senses, everything that Westerners are not typified into understanding, they deem magical or speculative or imaginative, and those terms get to be under an umbrella of other. All of that is absolutely memoir, absolute truth-telling. This is not mythology nor magic. It is our reality. Just because you don’t see spirits don’t mean the rest of us don’t!
Can you tell me why you named all the chapters after trees?
How to Be Unmothered, it’s poetry, it’s memoir, it’s nature, it’s psychology, it’s a history text, it’s geography, it’s all of these things. So in using that term memoir, I am broadening, recontextualizing, redefining, and innovating what memoir is. It’s a protest. I’m not just protesting these horribly abusive parents; I’m protesting all of these perspectives that are abusive and all of the ways in which I’m speaking for all of the things that are silenced. Nature is sentient. Nature has a voice. Nature has agency. Nature has greater powers than we have, and we live in a world that is blithely destroying nature, and that is problematic as hell. But also, they belong in this book, these trees. How many ways are we impacted by trees? My childhood was very impacted by the surrounding of these trees, and they played central characters in my life. So I can’t write about the father and mother and not write about the beings that gave me peace, and gave me rest, and gave me comfort, because it’s essentially their story as well.
You dedicated this book to your soul. What does it mean for you to have this book written and out in the world?
It means that I’ve done what I came here to do, what I was told to do, what I needed to do, what saved my life, what kept me alive. It means that I trusted myself, my soul, when nothing else verified this journey. And it’s a thank-you to my soul that kept me alive.
There are so many things that you don’t remember until you actually physically put pen to paper. But also, your soul is timeless, right? Like this work was already written even when I didn’t write it, and it was waiting for me to do it. In doing that, it’s writing back and writing forward to the being that gives you animation. There’s the physical being but there’s your soul, and you are writing for it. I think that’s necessary.
Is there anything coming next for you?
I’m working on book two, but I am not writing book two right now. I started writing it, and had to stop. I’m going to start again next summer. I am writing it in my head right now, where I’m walking the land a lot, and there are things that have to happen inside of me for me to have that space, so I’m letting it happen; that’s part of the writing process.
I walk several miles a day, I walk through the park, I walk among the trees, and that’s how I figure things out. And it hit me that I was rushing too quickly from How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir to book two. How to Be Unmothered is my baby. It’s my book, but it’s literally my baby. Not to hold its hand into the world is to unmother my baby, and so what I’m working on is essays in that universe, and staying with it for a while, and nurturing it, and mothering it into the world. That’s what I need to do while book two is percolating in the back of my mind.
Irina Costache is a journalist living in Brooklyn. She is pursuing a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at New York University and writes about culture, identity, and literature.
Camille U. Adams, PhD, is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her memoir, How to Be Unmothered, was recognized as a finalist for the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Honors for her work include Best of The Net: Nonfiction 2024, five nominations for the Pushcart Prize, three Best of the Net: Nonfiction nominations, and recognition for a notable essay in Best American Essays 2022. Among Adams’s awarded fellowships are an inaugural Tin House Reading Fellowship, an inaugural Granta Nature Writing Workshop fellowship, an inaugural Anaphora Arts Italy Writing Retreat Fellowship, a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a Community of Writers Fellowship, and a Roots Wounds Words Fellowship. She is a Tin House alum and has received support from Kenyon Writers Workshop, VONA, and others.