My first draft of Malik's years inside was wrong in the way that well-intentioned outside perspectives are usually wrong: it was too clean, too literary, too much about what prison does to the soul and not enough about what it does to Tuesdays.
My first draft of Malik's years inside was wrong in the way that well-intentioned outside perspectives are usually wrong: it was too clean, too literary, too much about what prison does to the soul and not enough about what it does to Tuesdays.
I spent a year fixing it.
I read memoirs. I read legal briefs and DOJ reports. I read the work of people who had been inside Alabama's correctional system and survived it and found language for it afterward. I spoke with men who had been released after long sentences and were learning, in their forties and fifties, to navigate a world that had moved on without them. I listened more than I talked, which is unusual for me.
What I learned was this: incarceration is not primarily dramatic. It is primarily boring, and the boredom is itself a form of violence. Time that moves too slowly and too fast at once. The particular anxiety of the prison phone call — the thirty seconds before connection, the background noise, the way you learn to compress everything important into three minutes before the line drops. Malik's voice across that phone became one of the emotional centers of the book. How he learned to say everything in code. How Lena learned to hear it.
The scene that changed the book — and changed how I understood Malik — was the one I kept putting off writing: his first full day back in the world after release. The fluorescent lights of a supermarket. The overwhelming, absurd abundance of breakfast cereal. The way his hands shook in the checkout line for no reason he could identify.
I got it wrong four times before I got it right. The fifth version was the one that made me cry at my own desk, which is usually how I know I've found it.