What Tears Us Apart

by Deborah Cloyed

*Contains spoilers*

  1. The story is set against the backdrop of the 2007–2008 political uprisings in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. What role does setting play in this story, and how would it be different if the setting were elsewhere?

  2. The story jumps back and forth in time, and is told from different points of view. Why do you think a story like this would be structured in such a way? How would it be different if it were told linearly?

  3. Atonement is a running theme throughout this story. Which characters are atoning and what are their sins, real or perceived? How does each character’s atonement manifest itself and what does this say about that person?

  4. One of the things Leda most admires in Ita is the way he treats the orphans. Why do you think Leda finds this trait in him so attractive? How do Ita and Estella contrast in their parenting styles?

  5. Ita’s mother’s necklace is a very meaningful item in the story. Why do you think Ita would give it to Leda when he was so adamant that neither Chege nor Kioni could touch it? Why does Chege throw the necklace to the ground during Leda’s attack scene, rather than keep it or sell it? What does it symbolize? And how does its significance compare to the necklace from Leda’s adoptive father?

  6. As with most people, Chege’s character is complex. He is both loyal and betraying toward Ita, and both brutal and kind toward Leda. What do you think motivates him?

  7. Ita seems to make Leda very happy, and he thinks the world of her. Why do you think she lets Chege kiss her on voting day?

  8. Money, opportunity and privilege are running themes in the story. How do the different characters make use of what is available to them? How would their lives be different if they were in others’ shoes—Ita in Leda’s, for instance, or Leda in Ita’s?

  9. For much of the story, Leda seems to be motivated by her “little monsters”—the demons within that make her feel as though she doesn’t deserve the love of a good man such as Ita. Do you think this is a common insecurity in people in general? Why? And if so, how do you feel it drives people’s behaviors?

  10. The scene in which Leda is attacked by Chege’s gang, and then Chege himself, subverts expectations in the end. Would you have perceived the story and the characters’ decisions differently if this scene had played out differently? How?

  A Conversation with Deborah Cloyed

  Where did the idea for What Tears Us Apart come from?

  On the surface, the idea came directly from my time spent in East Africa, an experience that affected me emotionally more than any of the other places I’ve lived abroad. While many of my experiences of the landscape and kind, humor-loving people were positive, on the whole my stay felt like riding a roller coaster of identity, my sense of self shifting with every new encounter. Everything I thought I believed about race, class, poverty, religion, violence, charity, government and history was challenged time and time again. I took lots of notes and photographs—I knew I would eventually want to write about it, attempt to make sense of my conflicted reaction. But when I returned to the U.S., I set about writing my first book, The Summer We Came to Life, which was set in Honduras, instead. At that time in my life I was itching to get down Samantha’s story, plus I realize now I wasn’t ready yet to process the cascade of emotion surrounding my time in East Africa.

  The novel is set during the 2007 Kenyan elections, and the resultant uprisings countrywide—particularly the Kibera slum. What about this time and place inspired you to use it as the setting for your story?

  I spent the summer of 2007 volunteering in rural Muslim areas of Tanzania and Kenya, assisting women with budding micro-finance initiatives. Many experiences there, positive and negative, inspired and informed the book. In transit before and after, I spent time in cosmopolitan Nairobi. It was difficult to convince friends to take me into Kibera, to visit an orphanage, but that experience was one of the most powerful of all. Meeting children living in the most difficult of circumstances, I found myself asking big questions. What is privilege? Destiny? Justice? Nationality? Even the very nature of personality—would we still be ourselves born and raised under completely different circumstances? Regarding the political end of things, my entire time in Kenya I’d been poking about, asking naive questions about tribal affiliation, reading newspapers and magazines, in eager anticipation of the election. Months later, around Christmastime, I watched in horror from my cozy bedroom in snowy Northern Virginia while unimaginable atrocities swept across many places I’d just been—cities and countryside. It affected me profoundly—the sickening mystery of how human beings turn on each other. I chose to set the story specifically in Kibera, however, because it embodied what the book was about for me—inner demons borne of strife and frustration, dashed hopes and complicated alliances.

  We experience this story largely from two distinct points of view—Leda’s and Ita’s. What were the challenges in writing the voice of a young Kenyan man?

  An earlier draft of the novel had Leda written in first person and Ita in a more distant third person, with fewer chapters from his point of view. This was due to nothing more than my trepidation about writing from the perspective of a male from a different culture and world. Even though I’d done months of research, scoured accounts and blogs and interviewed male Kenyan friends, I was still pinned by apprehension and an awareness of how I might be judged for such an attempt. But as the book progressed and took on its own life, it felt more and more unjust not to give Ita his own equal point of view. I knew him intimately by then, certainly as well as I knew Leda. And truthfully, neither one of them could be any more different than me and my life experience. So one day I said—aloud—Okay, Ita, now is the time. Speak up. And he did. And what he had to say reminded me of something I already knew—the human condition is a singular experience in a variety of flavors, but composed of the same emotional ingredients. We all feel abandonment, hope, despair, humiliation, indignation and the bittersweet ache of love. Therein lies the bridge by which we connect to one another.

  All of the characters are both endearing and deeply flawed. Do you have a favorite character among them? If so, who and why?

  This is a question I got asked a lot about my first book, with its motley crew of characters. The truth is, I have to be equally passionate about all the characters to create them in the first place. But characters have a way of taking on their own lives, and by then I love them in the same way I love my family—with all their idiosyncrasies, and knowing they are destined to be a part of my life forever.

  I spend a lot of time contemplating people. I eavesdrop shamelessly. I have a penchant for staring and an odd tendency to ask strangers uncomfortable questions. Habitually, I create life stories for people on the sidewalk and the subway. A crowded restaurant is a meal of quirks and mannerisms, traveling a crossword puzzle of faces. What I mean is, I’m equally as taken with trying to figure out how someone could be or become Estella as how Leda survives being her daughter or how someone like Ita would feel so many conflicting feelings toward a person like Chege.

  Chege is one of the most complex characters of all. Why did you choose not to show any scenes from his point of view?

  In the end, this book is a love story. In life or in books, a love story belongs to two people—the story of how they come together, how they grow into one, the times they nearly fall apart, and how they stitch or snip the thread. Of course, in life as in books, it isn’t that simple. There will always be peripheral characters in our love stories—in-laws and exes and interlopers—woven into the tapestry. But the weavers—the tellers—are the lovers. This story belongs to Ita and Leda.

  The orphans really come to life, right from the beginning. Did you know what their personalities would be from the very beginning or did they unfold as such throughout the course of your writing?

  Michael and Ntimi I knew and loved long before I had the story in place. They were modeled loosely on a handful of children I’d gotten to know in Kenya. I lived with a family of six and spent time at three different orp
hanages. In addition, I grew up with a huge extended family, I teach photography inelementary schools, and am a proud aunt to my young niece and nephew. In short, I adore children and relate to them well. I’m especially fascinated by how personality shapes our lives from such an early age. If I closed my eyes, instantly I could picture Michael’s wide, serious eyes and Ntimi’s quick smile. I loved the contrast of those two and couldn’t wait to get to know them better. But Jomo was a surprise. Crafting his sad history, I came to understand how he mirrored Leda in so many ways, why they were drawn to each other, and how Ita’s gentle way with Jomo mirrored his relationship with Leda. Sometimes in life, we miraculously (though I like to think of it as destiny), manage to find the one person who can uniquely help make us into the best version of ourselves. If we let them, of course. Jomo and Leda share the same struggle—to accept Ita’s love. Jomo naturally took on much more prominence in the story, eventually coming to play a lead role in the book’s climax.

  One of the various takeaways from this story is that morality is profoundly nuanced. Why was this theme important for you to explore?

  I’m deeply troubled by things like infidelity and betrayal, even when it’s not happening to me. This book is really about inner demons—how one’s best intentions get derailed. As I contemplated the violence in Kenya and other world tragedies, I began to consider large-scale events in terms of individual morality. From afar, a thing like genocide seems like a collective monster. But isn’t it a collective of individual decisions? I found myself exploring the possibility that life experience coalesces into an individual making immoral choices, an idea I find as unnerving as it is explanatory.

  In my thirties, as I contemplate daunting things like marriage, starting a family, seeing my parents age and relationships crumble around me, I find the idea of a gray, sliding scale of morality terrifying. I yearn to deny it, convince myself there is very simply a right and a wrong choice, a way to prevent precious things from being soiled or lost. But it was inescapable, writing about the thing that scares me the most: maybe there are no good or bad people, only people making good or bad decisions. I am interested to see what readers think about this.

  Your first book, The Summer We Came to Life, is very different from this one. How did you progress to writing a love story from that story about friendship?

  A fascinating thing about writing fiction has been seeing it align with the different stages in my life. My teen years were all about angst, my early twenties all about rebellion—separating from my parents and societal expectation and blazing an identity out of sheer, pigheaded obstreperousness (thankfully my writing from these two periods will never see the light of day!). I wrote The Summer We Came to Life when I was traveling the world and couldn’t wait to get back to my best friends. After I turned thirty, when I started What Tears Us Apart, I was back in Los Angeles, settled domestically, and wrapped in happy love. I was ready to tackle things outside of myself. The Summer We Came to Life was the right time in my life to write about friendships, finding yourself and standing on your own. What Tears Us Apart was the right time to write about love and war, and the war of love.

  Share your thoughts and questions with Deborah Cloyed. Visit her on Facebook, at www.facebook.com/Writer.DeborahCloyed.

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  ISBN: 9781460309742

  Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Cloyed

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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