The choices humans make

US author KALI WALLACE is interviewed by Ramona Depares ahead of her participation in this year’s National Book Festival.

You sold your first work back in 2010. How do you feel that your style has evolved since then?

I think I’ve grown a lot more confident in my ability to tell emotionally complicated and layered stories with honesty and power. When I first started, I focused a lot on the style of my prose. I wanted everything I wrote to be a bit tricky, which meant I was approaching every story like a puzzle-box that the reader needed to figure out. But as I’ve written and published more, I’ve come to value emotional honesty over those supposedly clever games. I spend a lot more time working on the emotional heart of the story now, and a lot less time thinking about whether I’m outsmarting the readers. 

I think this is a natural evolution for me. It’s easy for a writer to start with wanting to prove how smart they are. Where it gets hard – where the real work of telling stories begins – is in getting beyond that initial ego-driven goal and into the complex, messy, painful business of writing about the great and terrible things that humans do to themselves and each other in...