While writing her novel, His Only Wife, Peace Adzo Medie, discovered Toni Morrison’s quote, ‘If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’: ‘it resonated with me,’ Medie said. ‘One of the reasons I wrote this novel was because I was hungry for stories about my hometown and of the ordinary in people’s lives in Ghana.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I read a lot of North American and European children’s books; they were more widely available. When I was about ten, one of my uncles gave me a set of beautiful clothbound children’s classics, including titles like Heidi, King Arthur, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I read them until they began to fall apart and traded them with friends for other books. But I also read a lot of the adult books that were widely available in Ghana: John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Judith Krantz, etc. I also went through a stage in my early teens where I was really into books about the mafia, after reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather...