Musa Okwonga Does Not Strive to Be Universal

At the Rumpus, author and poet Musa Okwonga discusses In the End, It Was All About Love, a book that required him to be comfortable with the unknown. “For me—I don’t want to be universal—for me as a writer, the frightening thing about writing is that I often don’t know where I’m going to end up,” Okwonga says. “Not in terms of a plot, but I’m not sure what I’ll discover about myself, and the thing about writing a memoir, it’s about being seen. People write memoirs and they emerge being hated. So, when you’re writing, sometimes you’re afraid of what’s going to emerge.”