How Do You Build a Life on a Shifting Foundation?

Author Angela Flournoy walks into the wilderness of modern adulthood

By Anna Faller | Sept. 27, 2025

If you ask award-winning author Angela Flournoy, writing should have an inherent level of risk, regardless of genre or discipline.

“I think good storytelling has real stakes,” she says. “That doesn’t mean it can’t be quiet or super interpersonal, but you have to feel as a reader that there’s actually something in the balance.”

In her highly-anticipated sophomore novel, The Wilderness, that risk is hidden in modern adulthood, from building and maintaining relationships, to blazing career paths, and generally staying afloat in an ever-changing cultural landscape.

What could be more precarious than living the rest of your life?

Join Flournoy as she takes the National Writers Series stage on Thursday, Oct. 2, at 7pm for a conversation surrounding the “wilderness” of real adulthood, the people that get us through it, and the experience of building identity—especially as a woman—in the 21st century.

The Author

Flournoy’s own story begins when she received her first journal around age six as a gift from her aunt. “I started writing in it,” she says, and the rest is, well, so much better than history.

Her debut novel, The Turner House, was set in Detroit and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize as well as a National Book Award nominee. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times.

In addition to her writing work, Flournoy, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a faculty member at the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College.

“Something I tell my students is that you have to figure out how to have skin in the game. There has to be an emotional center,” Flournoy notes. “With whatever I’m writing, I try to figure out how to make it feel real and immediate.”

The Book

In her newest book, The Wilderness, Flournoy definitely gets real. The concept behind the book came to her nearly a decade ago in 2016, after she and a group of girlfriends from college had spent nearly half of their lives together.

“I realized that though we weren’t family, we spent more time together than family, and probably knew more about each other than our family members did,” Flournoy says.

These were chosen bonds—not family of origin, or a spouse, or children—and though they were important, they were also sometimes fragile. That complicated perspective on friendship offered Flournoy’s story a background of community, safety, and even drama as characters reach other major milestones in their lives.

“I wanted to think about that and what it would mean for this group to get older and to have real-life challenges. How would they meet or not meet them, and what would that mean for their connections?” Flournoy says.

The Characters

The Wilderness follows a tight-knit group of Black women—Desiree and her sister, Danielle, Nakia, January, and Monique—from New York to Los Angeles over two decades starting in the early 2000s as they navigate the unfamiliar world of adulthood against the increasingly-fraught cultural backdrop of modern America.

Per Flournoy, they’re also entering what she considers the true “coming-of-age” period: aka, the assumed-adult years of our twenties and thirties, which feel like a new road but arrive with no map.

Unlike early adolescence, there’s no one to walk you through the death of a parent, for instance; no dorm Facebook group for those in the midst of trying to build a savings from scratch; and no YouTube tutorial for a surprise pregnancy or how to carve out a fulfilling career, all of which are challenges her characters face.

Instead, we tend to settle into adulthood after we’re already thought to have reached it. This means that no two paths through that wilderness are exactly the same.

“I find that, especially in this country, there are a lot fewer guides to help you figure out the life [you] want to have when some people are telling you you’re halfway done with it,” says Flournoy. “That was one of the things that interested me about this book.”

The Culture

In addition to the novel’s genesis, 2016 also marked a cultural shift for Flournoy: the first Trump presidency.

At the time of the election, she notes, Flournoy had been working on the book through a New York Public Library fellowship and had intended to include a few near-future years as part of the setting. After Trump took office, however, she found that her expectations of that future timeline suddenly felt uncertain.

“If this one thing [could] happen, a lot of things [could] happen. Certain things that I take for granted about the way of American life felt in flux,” Flournoy says.

She knew topics like immigration, the rise of social media (and the subsequent decline of in-person communication), the erasure of history, and systemic racism had long been bubbling under the country’s surface and would almost certainly continue to resonate throughout America.

So, she rolled, or rather, wrote with it. Her characters experience the recession of the late 2000s, the rise of technology and viral fame, soaring housing prices, and more.

“[This] is a book that’s informed by actually living through these years,” she adds. “How are you supposed to put the building blocks in place to enjoy the rest of your life in a country and in a world where even things we thought [were permanent] can’t be taken for granted?”

The Wilderness might just have the answers.

The Event

An Evening with Angela Flournoy takes place on Thursday, Oct. 2, at 7 p.m. at Milliken Auditorium (1410 College Dr.) in Traverse City and via livestream. Tickets range from $10-$20 plus ticket fees, and The Wilderness is available via Horizon Books. Both in-person and livestream tickets can be purchased through the links on the National Writers Series website. The guest host for the event is Audrey Irontree, an accomplished fiction writer and National Writers Series education director. For more information, visit nationalwritersseries.org.