Tiny Imperfections by Alli Frank, Asha Youmans
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WANT A PREVIEW? HERE’S A PREVIOUS Q&A WITH THE AUTHORS
In Tiny Imperfections (Putnam), debut authors Alli Frank and Asha Youmans deliver The Wedding Date meets Class Mom in this delicious novel of love, money and misbehaving parents.
At 39, Josie Bordelon’s modeling career as the “it” black beauty of the ’90s is far behind her. Now director of admissions at San Francisco’s most sought-after private school, she’s chic, single and determined to keep her 17-year-old daughter, Etta, from making the same mistakes she did. But Etta has plans of her own. If only Josie could manage Etta’s future as well as she manages the shenanigans of the overanxious, overeager parents at school — or her best friend’s attempts to coax Josie out of her sex sabbatical and back onto the dating scene.
In this recent Q&A, the authors discuss their backgrounds, the book’s key themes and their collaboration as co-authors, among other topics.
Q: You are both longtime educators and friends. Tiny Imperfections is your first book. What made you decide to write this book now?
A: Working together at a private elementary school, chuckling over a comical student or at parent shenanigans, we would often end our laughter session with, “If we ever write a book, that is definitely going in there!” At the time, we had no plans for writing a book. But three years later, we began with a long bus ride to the Boise airport, a Costco size bag of popcorn, a laptop and a humorous idea and a phone call. And that became the as-right-as-it-can-be time for us to write a book.
Q: What differentiates your novel from others out there about the private school world and education?
A: We wanted to explore race and private school education from the adult perspective. Not the parents, but the employees. The ones who work hard keeping an institution running that primarily exists for the forward trajectory of the white upper-middle class, have an interesting perspective to share. Creating a protagonist in charge of admitting those families, that is also a person of color, was even more intriguing to us. We knew it would be a captivating story.
The other obvious differentiating factor is that our novel, focusing on race and privilege, was written not by a black author, not by a white author, but by both. We both have known and experienced, professionally and personally, the feelings, actions and consequences of the Bordelon women and their complicated relationship with Fairchild Country Day School. We knew we equally had a stake in the story and a shared path forward on how to tell it.
Q: Asha, your father was the first African American graduate from the Lakeside School, which you also attended. How did his experience shape your own at the school? What made you want to go into education afterward?
A: Not only did my father and I attend the school, my son is the first 3rd-generation African American to have graduated from Lakeside School, and my brother and a cousin attended as well. We are all proud of being Lakeside Lions and, like members of any institution, we all have our own stories to tell. Mine included following in the footsteps of a pioneering personality before me: my father, TJ Vassar. Looking back at his history in politics, social justice, equity and inclusion and the lengths to which he waged his fight against inequities, especially in education, would be daunting for anyone to follow. But the tremendous aspect about the community at Lakeside School is their capacity to accept each student as an individual. He was one of a handful of black students during most of his educational experiences at Lakeside and after. He taught me to be open to peeling back the layers of race in discussion with others and to do so without judgment. If he could manage such an outlook under the circumstances and at such a challenging time in our country’s history as the 1960s, then I certainly could do the same through the ’80s.
Q: This book centers around the notion that regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, social status or gender, we all want what’s best for our children and will do just about anything to set them up for success. Can you speak to this a bit?
A: When we talk about sending our children off into the world of adults and all that entails, the differentiation between parents and to what lengths they interfere at this age is what seems to fascinate us most at this time. The government considers our kids adults at 18, ready to vote, able to fight for our country and capable of serving their own prison time. But as parents, for some reason, we are not quite ready to let them go. The barometer for judging parents at this stage comes with quite a bit of judgment, and we are also seeing scrutiny along with that. While most parents may answer that they would not cheat to increase their child’s chance of getting into college, the answers are no doubt quite different in practice. The honest answer might be, who can judge until we each get there?
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: We hope readers take away a bunch of hearty belly laughs from reading our book. We grew up in progressive families that welcomed people of all shades and types where we learned to laugh with and at each other. Seeking variety in relationships is a way to learn, grow and develop empathy. What better way to initiate a connection than to flash a smile, share a laugh, tell a joke as a way to cross those bridges we encounter? We also hope each reader reaches out to someone different from themselves and builds friendships on positive curiosity. We often tip-toe around each other, straining to learn about our differences but not knowing how to approach others for lessons we want or need. We encourage folks to be open to questions and respond to curiosity with kindness. What we want is for people to become and stay connected.
Visit the Penguin Random House website for more on the book and how to purchase.
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Photo © Jim Garner 2019
About Alli Frank and Asha Youmans:
Alli Frank was raised in Yakima, WA, the only child of two parents who instilled in her that hard work coupled with a resilient spirit will take you far. So up some of the highest mountains Alli climbed, down insanely steep terrain she skied and across long swathes of land she ran. To pay for all this adventure, Alli has worked in education for over 20 years in San Francisco and Seattle — from an overcrowded, cacophonous public high school to a pristine private girl’s school. She has been a teacher, curriculum leader, coach, college counselor, assistant head, private school co-founder, sometimes pastor, often mayor and de facto parent therapist. A graduate of Cornell and Stanford Universities, Alli can still be found with her nose deep in a book or hunkered down at the movies, never one to miss a great story. Alli lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, two daughters and terribly cute mini-Bernedoodle. When she needs good food (cause she can’t really cook) she turns to her co-author Asha Youmans. This is her first book.
Asha Youmans was raised in Seattle, WA, by an educational and civil rights pioneer father and a children’s hospital administrator mother, along with a sister and a brother she admires and adores. As a child, Asha was a member of a two-time city champions Double Dutch team, among the first wave of girls to integrate Little League baseball and rode a unicycle, tumbled and juggled as a member of a traveling circus acrobatics team. She also read everything she could get her hands on from X-Men comic books to the Clan of the Cave Bear series to Camus. Enrolled in gifted programs while attending public school, Asha went on to graduate from one of America’s premier private academies, Lakeside School, from which her father, TJ Vassar, earned a diploma as the school’s first black graduate. After receiving a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Asha returned to Seattle where she taught in public and private schools for nearly 20 years. Asha is a fabulous home cook who loves storytelling and connecting with others by making them smile. She lives with her white husband, two ethnically ambiguous sons, and a dog that is part Yorkie and part who-the-heck-knows. This is her first book.
