Lola Jaye’s The Attic Child is a hauntingly powerful and emotionally charged book about family secrets, love, loss, identity and belonging.
Jaye spoke with rolling out about what inspired her to write the book.
What inspired you to write this book?
The Attic Child was inspired by a photograph that I saw in a gallery. It was a little boy, a Black child, and he was from the 1800s. He was dressed in this very westernized clothing, and it was something in his eyes that told me that I need to write this little boy’s story I did a bit of research and I realized that he lived in England for a very short while, and he died at 13. But my story is a reimagining of his life because he was taken away so young, so I’m getting to write what I think could have happened if he had been allowed to live.
So it all started with a picture?
It did. There was something in his eyes and they just followed me. I know that the eyes of pictures follow you around when you go to galleries, but there was just something deeper in this, and I knew I had to find out more. I’m so glad I did because he was a special little boy. He belonged to a family in Africa, but he was brought over to England and given a new life, and it’s something that resonated with me, so I thought I needed to tell his story.
What was the process like writing this book?
It was a crazy time. It was 2020 in England, and we had a stay-at-home order that lasted for months, so we had to stay inside. Obviously, the book is called The Attic Child, so there is an element of it where somebody is locked in an attic. I was at home kind of isolated, but not in the same way.
Also, Black Lives Matter was blowing up all over the world. This time, people were realizing that racism actually existed, which was great. I saw video footage of statues of explorers being pulled down, and here I was writing about an explorer. I wasn’t writing about him, but I was writing about the child [who] was brought over by an explorer. It was almost like life was imitating art, which was strange, because I’ve written books before, but life was never imitating art at the same time. It was a strange time for all of us, mostly for Black people, and being retriggered by the events in the news. I was then retriggered by what I was writing because it was mirroring it, so it was a unique time.
