As author Angela Flournoy entered her 30s, she found herself thinking more and more about friendship: the ways friends enriched her life, the importance of maintaining friendships into adulthood and what she sees as the lack of realistic female relationships across popular culture.
“For example, [on] ‘Sex and the City,’ they are often going to brunch and kind of debriefing about the dates they’ve been on,” Flournoy said. “But I was always wondering like, what else could they be talking about if they weren’t talking about these dates quite so much?”
Her reflections led her to her latest and second novel, “The Wilderness” – a decade-spanning narrative exploring four Black women as they navigate the complex intersections of life, shifting race and class dynamics, and friendship. Taking place from 2008 to 2028, Flournoy originally intended to call the novel “The Millennials,” hoping to dispel the shallow stereotypes attached to women of her generation.
“I think when people think about a millennial woman, they do not think about the characters in this book,” Flournoy said. “They don’t think about Black women. They don’t think about women who are not just eating avocado toast and drinking lattes but [women who] have really complex lives.”
The protagonists in “The Wilderness” reflect Flournoy’s desire to portray “how middle age looks” for self-described “elderly millennials” like herself — a portrayal that encompasses everything from romance to work to bucking the social norms of their baby-boomer predecessors.
“We were aware that some of the markers of success that our parents, who were mostly boomers, could look to were not necessarily guaranteed for us,” Flournoy said. “Maybe we would not ever get married, maybe we will not ever have children at a larger rate … how do you still feel like a grownup?”
Flournoy said the final title of the novel, which is inspired by L.A. artist Betye Saar’s wildfire painting “The Wounded Wilderness,” reflects the concept of feeling lost in adulthood and adapting to a lack of guidelines on how to find a grounded, settled life.
Ultimately, “The Wilderness” recognizes the difficulty of navigating life when life is inherently unpredictable, but still finds room to anchor itself in the power of everlasting friendships and community.
“I think today, in 2025, in this current iteration of American life, what I want readers to take away is that it’s time for us to think a little broader about what it means to be in community,” Flournoy said.
Guest
- Angela Flournoy, author of “The Wilderness”
