Yaa Gyasi on the Inevitable Risk of Living

At the New Statesman, Yaa Gyasi discusses the theme of risk in her latest novel, Transcendent Kingdom, and how it is necessary in both pleasure and pain, primarily seen through Gifty, the novel’s protagonist, and her study of addiction as a result of her brother’s death. “We humans are reckless with our bodies,” Gyasi says, “reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives.”