Like many educators, my semester often ends with a terrible cold. Despite taking preventative measures, it’s hard to dodge germs on a college campus filled with coughing, sneezing students trying to get through final exams. Over the years, I’ve come to think of these colds as opportunities to rest instead of inconveniences. But during my recent December bout, I found myself staying up late several nights in a row, unable to put down the new novel by D.C.-based writer (and daughter of Baltimore), Lauren Francis-Sharma.
Casualties of Truth moves briskly between two timelines and settings: Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1990s and Washington, D.C. in 2018. It opens in post-apartheid South Africa where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings are underway, allowing victims and perpetrators to confront the brutal history of apartheid. The narrative then shifts to Washington, D.C., where Prudence Wright, a former McKinsey consultant, lives a comfortable, affluent life with her husband and young son. When she encounters Matshediso, a man she met decades earlier as a law student in South Africa, the secrets and consequences of the two timelines merge, threatening to upend everything that Prudence cares about.
As an admirer of Francis-Sharma’s first two novels, I thought I knew what to expect from her third: rich, complex characters; an eye for historical detail; and graceful, gorgeous prose. While Casualties of Truth delivers on all these things, it’s also something more. It’s a thrillingly written page turner that delves deeply into issues of race, class, and the lingering effects of state-sanctioned injustice during a complicated moment in history when the “truth” not only feels highly subjective, but subject to extreme manipulation. What a meaningful time to experience Francis-Sharma writing at the height of her powers with unsettling prescience and insight about forgiveness in the long shadow of unpardonable wrongs.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jung Yun: Your first two books were set in Trinidad and the United States in the 18th, 19th, and mid-20th centuries. Although your newest book, Casualties of Truth, is set in more recent times, it seems like history often informs your work. Why do you think this is so?
Lauren Francis-Sharma: I’m always in awe of folks who write contemporary literature. It takes a long time for me to think about a particular moment—how it’s relevant today, what we can glean from it. My first book began in the 1940s as I traced my grandmother’s story. I didn’t think of myself as a historical novelist then, but it was during the book tour for ‘Til the Well Runs Dry when I started to realize people didn’t really understand Trinidad or know about the lives of enslaved people in the Caribbean, and so I wrote the second book, Book of the Little Axe, which was a bit of a repositioning of that story, showing the connections between the Caribbean and the U.S. And with Casualties of Truth, my main character has Caribbean parents, but she’s American and travels to South Africa where she’s pulling the thread to see the connections between all these places.
JY: I understand that you were actually in South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings. Why were you there, and what prompted you to start thinking about this period again?
LFS: I was there in 1996 for a law school internship, working at a law firm that was helping amnesty applicants—ANC members who wanted to apply for amnesty for the activism they’d done. Many times, this activism crossed legal boundaries, so I was helping those people fill out applications. And one day my boss said I probably should go witness the hearings to better understand exactly what I was doing, and also what took place in South Africa during apartheid. So, I went and within the first hour I realized, oh wait, wait, wait, this is far more than I thought.
Being a copious note taker in law school, I took very copious notes during these sessions. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I’ve kept those notebooks since 1996. It was during COVID that I flipped through the pages, and this book is the result.
JY: The main character of Casualties of Truth grew up in Baltimore before finding herself in South Africa as a law student. Could you tell us more about Prudence’s background and your decision to give her a connection to this city?
LFS: I grew up in Baltimore, so it seemed like a natural place to set her childhood. But Prudence goes off to Cambridge for college, and while there, she experiences a lot of imposter syndrome and struggles with how to shape herself as a human being. I think that follows her throughout this story, always wondering: who am I? What’s important to me? Is this the life that I want to be living? Does it reflect the values that my city, Baltimore, gave me and the family I grew up with there? Those are the questions that haunt her. Baltimore is the place that checks her value system; it’s a place that checks mine too.
JY: Your novel feels like a master class in building tension as you alternate Pru and Matshediso’s first meeting and their unexpected reunion, over two decades later. Did you initially set out to write a literary thriller, or do even think about your novel in these terms?
LFS: Thank you, and no, I don’t consider myself a suspense writer at all. But what I did realize was I’ve been workshopping this story in real life for a really long time. When I’m at a dinner party and something comes up about South Africa and I say, “Oh yeah, I spent some time there at the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings,” people will lean in and go, “Oh, really? Tell us more about that.” But then I start telling these horrific stories, these true stories about apartheid, and very quickly people pull back because truth can be uncomfortable.
I knew if I was going to tell this story, I was going to have to tell it in a way that people couldn’t turn away from. I used some literary thriller craft technique, which makes it more suspenseful, but ultimately, it’s a story about injustice and vengeance and questioning your own morality and your own boundaries. How far are you willing to go to protect your family, to protect yourself, and to hide past transgressions?
JY: There are a number of interesting, complicated relationships in the book. One that was really meaningful to me was Prudence’s relationship with her son. Why was it important for her to be a cautious sort of mother who sometimes had difficulty being tender with her child?
LFS: Prudence is someone who’s contending with the losses in her own childhood. I don’t think it gives anything away to say that she lost one parent very early in life, and the other parent was emotionally unavailable. You’re seeing someone struggling to parent differently than her parents. She also has another weight in that her son is on the spectrum, so she needs to be more attentive and Matshediso’s appearance distracts her from being the kind of mother she hopes to be.
We don’t get to see Black women struggling with motherhood and a child with additional needs on the page very often. And there are a lot of Black women dealing with that. One of the things you’ll notice in the story is the internal shame that comes with her parenting. There are cultural nuances and the story challenges some of those boundaries.
JY: What do you hope readers will eventually take away from reading your novel?
LFS: As I was going through my memories of my time in South Africa, it became evident that the hearings were about stories. The apartheid government did a fine job of suppressing the media, of keeping people from being able to communicate with one another, of hiding stories, particularly ones in which they were perpetuating harm on individual citizens.
I’d like people to realize how important it is to listen to each other’s stories and not to be fooled by governments and institutions that are intent on manipulating the media. Learn to be more media savvy. Americans didn’t know everything that was happening in South Africa because the South African government didn’t want people to know. And so the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out to hold these amnesty hearings, not just to move on with the punishing of criminals, but so that people could finally hear and be healed by stories. I guess in some respects, this book is a witnessing of these accounts that is long overdue. Pay attention to the story its telling.
In Conversation: Saturday, February 22, 3 p.m.
Lauren Francis-Sharma will be discussing Casualties of Truth with journalist, author, and TV/podcast host Tiffany D. Cross at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore. For more information and to register, please visit https://calendar.prattlibrary.org/event/lauren-francis-sharma-casualties-of-truth.
