Yevgenia is obsessed with reading Russian authors, such as Tolstoy. “A Country You Can Leave,” which takes its name from a Joseph Brodsky quote, is also a book about books. “I think it’s both humorous and utilitarian, and it says more about what she’s trying to get Lara to do as a woman in a society that struggles to see women as in control of their own bodies,” Angel-Ajani said.
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The most comical instances occur with Yevgenia’s constant philosophical advice about men and the different sections of the novel that begin with her sex advice about men. We see that more in the Inland Empire, perhaps because people are accessing similar services in the same buildings, so you have to interact with each other, and that’s where we overlap.”Īlthough dealing with painful realities, the novel has many funny and heartfelt moments. “While you have these distinct communities that are carved out on racial lines, the thing that is a common factor is poverty and how poverty shapes a more common experience. “This is the thing that is so profound about the Inland Empire,” Angel-Ajani said. Angel-Ajani has written two nonfiction books that touch on some of the topics in the novel, “Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade” and the upcoming “Intimate: Essays on Racial Terror.” The novel also doesn’t shy away from addressing day-to-day poverty and the anxieties of living in a system that can reinforce the cycle of hardship. “That’s part of the homesickness and trying to recreate a home when I was so far away, living in Hong Kong for all those years.” “A lot of the people featured in the book are an amalgamation or a collective and come from a historical fact of my life,” she said. While the novel isn’t autobiographical, the characters reflect people she knew growing up Angel-Ajani said they are all pieces of herself. “That declaration is a way she creates space in a lot of the same ways that especially first-generation immigrant kids have to make a claim of who they are even in the face of their parent’s positioning in the U.S.,” said Angel-Ajani. For Lara, rather than getting caught up on her mother’s attachment to the Soviet past, she’s working out who she is and who she will become. Her mother wishes she had a stronger relationship with Russian culture, and some neighbors in the Oasis Mobile Estates can’t fathom how she can have Black and Cuban heritage. Lara struggles against preconceived notions of who or how she should be. While her parents struggled to assimilate, Lara creates a uniquely American identity for herself, which creates some friction with her mother. “A Country You Can Leave” centers on a biracial teenage girl named Lara and her bartender mother, Yevgenia, a defector from the Soviet Union who raises her daughter without the child’s Afro-Cuban father. “These are landscapes and experiences that are disappearing and being radically altered by climate change and development, so there is something that we both gain and lose from that.” “There is a part of California, even for those of us in the last 15-20 years, that we don’t recognize anymore,” Angel-Ajani said. A Stanford University graduate with a doctorate in Anthropology and an MFA in creative writing, Angel-Ajani grew up in Riverside County in an unincorporated area near Perris, and the changes to the Inland Empire were on her mind as she wrote.
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