Flournoy grew up in West Covina, California, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles, reading fantasy novels under the covers with a flashlight and journaling from the time she was young. Her parents divorced around the time she was 7, and her father, a teacher, struggled with alcoholism. A few years later, her mother, Francine Harper, went to college while also working full time and raising Angela and her older sister, Candice. Harper recalls one weekend where, as was typical, she was consumed with homework, "and Angela wanted to do something, and she was upset because I was like, 'No baby I gotta write these papers.' And she said, 'It is not my fault that you waited 'til you were old to go back to college.' For a minute I felt bad but I knew that by my going back to school it set a good example for the girls."



At USC, Flournoy was a journalism major in the Annenberg School of Communications, but soon she decided to switch her major to English. (She says she never intended to be a journalist.) She was a joiner, particularly of black organizations: She lived on Somerville Place, USC's African-American themed floor, during her freshman year, and was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority and president of the Black Student Association. USC, says Flournoy, has always been a relatively good place to be a black student — although she's characteristically wry about why that might be. "How do you have a school that really cares about athletics and you don't value students of color? I think they have the most Olympic medals of any university, and I'd wager at least a third of those are black people. So if you don't want us here, give us those medals. Stop claiming those medals."

After graduating college in 2007, she moved to New York and took a job in PR, which she promptly lost after the markets crashed in 2008. She moved to Atlanta and enrolled in the Iowa Writers' Workshop the following year, when she was 24. Flournoy characterizes the way she was perceived at Iowa as, "I was not a star. I think people liked me, but not because of my writing. I was just sort of plugging along." When I asked one of her instructors, Alexander Chee — author of the critically acclaimed novels Queen of the Night and Edinburgh — what he thought of Flournoy's self-assessment, he was careful to say that he disagreed with it, but acknowledged that at the time, Flournoy wasn't one of the students getting "priority attention" from faculty. "But I just love her work so much that I assumed everyone thought the way I did," he said. "It's a little sad to me that in some ways that was true — it's a cautionary tale about people inside of their institutions that they're taking care of the people that seem to be flying under the radar."

At Iowa, the book that would become The Turner House started to take shape. In a summer workshop with the short story writer ZZ Packer (who is currently working on her first novel, about black soldiers during the Civil War), when Flournoy had around 15 pages written, she remembers people in the workshop being skeptical that 40-year-old Lelah would be so adept at texting her 21-year-old daughter — and implicitly, challenging the idea that a woman in her twenties could and should write characters who are older. "That was the moment when I realized, What about middle-aged people? They're depicted in a way in literature that is devoid of some of the realities. If you're middle-aged in 2008, you have an email address. You're not completely weary and bumbling. So I think that was one of the moments when I was like, 'I'm just going to have to make people contend with the fact that these people are not all 28.'"

The traces of Flournoy's time in Iowa — two years in workshops and a year as an instructor — are evident in her work and, now, in her teaching in the MFA programs at the New School and Columbia University. She got the idea to have a time limit on how long Lelah could stay in her family's house from Torres, the author of the novel We the Animals, who was a year ahead of her at Iowa. "He pointed something out that when you're writing a novel is really useful: when you have a clock, a time imperative. Narratively, just figuring out how to structure a thing is so useful, because when you have so many different ideas, you need something that's going to be the governing principle." And, she says, "You can't get out of a Marilynne Robinson workshop and think that sloppy or hasty characterization in any way is cool."

"What makes her book so special is her investment in the characters as real people rather than as symbolic people," said Tayari Jones, the author of novels Silver Sparrow, Leaving Atlanta, and The Untelling. Jones and Flournoy met in Washington, D.C., in 2012, and Jones blurbed The Turner House, calling it a "thrilling debut." "When you're dealing with something like Detroit, there's such an impulse to make the characters indicative of a problem, and there's especially pressure on African-American writers to write symbolic characters."

Flournoy's characters feel authentic because they are complicated and messy, but also because they speak like real people. Sometimes — as when one of the characters, David, is talking to his mother's neighbor, who lives on the street on the East Side where the Turners grew up, and says "I seen Troy Turner a couple weeks ago" — they speak in AAVE, or African-American Vernacular English. And sometimes — as when David is talking to nearly anyone else — they don't. And here is where Flournoy has become a quiet revolutionary of craft, because this is not the way you're supposed to do things in literature: If a character drops his G's at the end of gerunds, he always drops his G's at the end of gerunds; there's no going back and forth.

"That's not how people talk though," Flournoy says. "I think part of the reason it feels normal is because it's a book in which every single black person has their own sort of relationship with AAVE. Some people use it all the time, some people use it less of the time. But it really just comes down to instinct. It has to do with what you imagine a character sounds like. When Lelah talks to [her daughter] Brianne, she does not really employ AAVE, because she wants Brianne to go out in the world and not employ AAVE. Which in my very liberal, I guess, opinion, you're giving Brianne a handicap. She won't feel comfortable communicating in other spaces. I'm very happy I know how to code switch because even though some people may say that I don't always sound right doing it, I can communicate in a lot of spaces."

The only time her friend Torres says he's seen her ruffled was a recent Thanksgiving when the two were "drinking bourbon and playing Spades" with Flournoy's editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jenna Johnson (who also edits Torres), and Mathis, who was at Iowa with Torres and Flournoy. "There was some table talk, or at least there were accusations of table talk, and then there was some serious trash talk, and maybe Angela suggested Jenna might get cut, but it was all in good fun. In the morning Angela was mortified. I do believe that is the only time I truly saw her mortified." (When we speak a couple months later, Flournoy says, "I can't believe Justin told you the story about Spades.")