The writer was—is—Julie Otsuka, who wrote, among other novels, a haunting, boundary-expanding, award-winning book in 2011 about a group of Japanese wives sent from Japan to marry Japanese American husbands called The Buddha in the Attic. The women collectively narrate their journey in language that is lyrical and heartbreaking. When I ask him if he asked her to read The Water Dancer, he says he didn’t. He was intimidated by her and didn’t want to bother her.

He’s made an effort to surround himself with other fiction writers. “I sent the first chapter off to Michael Chabon—we’d struck up this friendship—and he just blasted it. ‘This is not fiction, bro,’ he said.” At this, Coates laughs. “He wrote this long-ass note. It was great. It was really great. I was totally depressed. But it helped. I said, ‘Okay, this is where I have to go; this is what it has to be.’ Everything proceeded from there.” He half-grins when he says it, and I believe his ruefulness is tempered by years of writing articles on deadline, of having his work line-edited and purged, of getting the kind of ruthless feedback that journalism engenders. But still, I imagine, it had to hurt. “It was deflating,” he said. “I was nowhere close, and he let me know, which is exactly what a good friend and good reader is supposed to do. I think so much of writing happens in those moments. Talent is important, but perseverance and high threshold for humiliation is maybe even more important?”

Coates also sought writing wisdom from the women in his life. His wife, Kenyatta Matthews, is his first reader. “She reads everything,” he says. “She reads more than I do.” Coates is aware that critics have seen a deficiency in his work regarding women, that their absence as fully realized people has been notable and noted. Even though The Water Dancer is told from Hiram’s perspective, Hiram would not survive without the women who protect him, care for him, teach him, and partner with him: his lover, Sophia, his mother, Rose, sold away from him; his adoptive mother, Thena; and finally Harriet Tubman, whom Hiram meets and befriends. “I feel like there was a great danger of writing this book as a kind of save-the-girl cowboy thing. So how do you prevent that? First of all, you try to muddy the whole saving thing as much as you possibly can. And secondly, you try really, really hard not to make the person an object of the protagonist. You just try to make them as full as you possibly can.” The women characters are the people he thought of the most. Everyone important to his writing life read with an eye toward this—Jackson and two other editors, Kenyatta, and himself. “That’s so hard to talk about,” says Coates. “It’s really hard to say what you had a hard time doing. Because you’re talking about the place where you know you felt your weakest.” It is the chief pursuit of a novelist to imbue those written about with life, with beating hearts and breath. And true to the experience of most debut novelists, this novel taught Coates how to write it, again and again.

“Coates has to resist the lure of the adventure story. He has to resist the lure of the cowboy. He has to resist the lure of the savior.”

But that kind of feedback that he sought out through the 10 years he spent writing and rewriting The Water Dancer only made him want to tell Hiram’s story even more, because not only is the story about how one lives in spite of the dehumanizing institution of slavery, to Coates, it is a love story. When he was writing, he listened to “a lot of sad-ass R & B,” he says. “A lot of songs about longing. I played the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody,’ Isaac Hayes, ‘Walk on By.’ ‘Look of Love.’ ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’ ” When I ask him why, he surprises me. “My mom reads serious stuff, and she also reads what people would refer to as trash, right.” As a teen, he says, “I read a lot of what people refer to as trash too. And I told her years ago that I was going to write her a romance novel. I told her this when I was 20.” He shakes his head. “And when I started researching the Civil War, the most heartbreaking shit to me was when these people would be divided from each other. I tried to imagine loving somebody the way I love my wife, and somebody being like, ‘That’s it—and your kid too, by the way.’ And I came across these letters about it.”