On May 16th at our Literary Debutante Ball, One Story will be celebrating seven of our authors who have recently published or will soon publish their debut books. In the weeks leading up to the Ball, we’ll be introducing our Debs through a series of interviews.
Today we’re talking to Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, author of One Story Issue #276, “Extinction,” and the novel The Other Wife (Riverhead).
The Other Wife is a meditative, quietly charged novel that traces the interior life of Susan “Zuzu” Braeburn, a biracial woman nearing forty who has built a seemingly ideal life with her wife, Agnes, and their beloved son. Despite this, Zuzu is haunted by past decisions—suspended between the safety of her present and the haunting “what-ifs” of her past. When a sudden loss pulls Zuzu back to her hometown, she finds herself reckoning with the choices that have shaped her: pursuing law over art, marrying Agnes while never fully resolving her complex feelings for her college friend Cash, and choosing her white mother over her Black father in childhood. With a restrained lyricism, Thomas-Kennedy captures the ache of lives half-lived and the strange intimacy of old wounds, crafting a story of quiet devastation and unspoken hope.
—Alina Lin Halliburton
Alina Lin Halliburton: Where were you when you found out The Other Wife was going to be published? How did you celebrate?
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy: At home, at the same table where I’d been frantically working on edits before my agent submitted the novel. I celebrated by rejoicing with my family and buying a healthy stack of new books.
ALH: The Other Wife explores marriage, reinvention, desire, loss, and longing with remarkable emotional precision and a searing, complicated tension. How did you approach building suspense in a narrative so deeply rooted in interiority and the quiet complexities of one’s day-to-day?
JTK: At one point in the novel Zuzu is looking for someone—literally checking inside closets and under furniture—but there is a certain door she refuses to open. This wasn’t intentionally metaphorical, but I find that suspense lies partly in understanding what your characters are afraid to see and afraid to acknowledge.
ALH: Zuzu is often navigating spaces that are both familiar and alienating; much of her story unfolds in the gaps between action, in beautiful, quiet moments where her internal life is so delicately rendered. Did you draw on any particular techniques—diaries, sketches, outlining, exercises—to stay connected to the subtleties of her evolving emotional state?
JTK: I knew there were certain objects and textures I wanted on the page—anchors for Zuzu’s assortment of memories. During the revision process, I found that some of them didn’t contribute meaningfully to the story—I had this radiator that I kept putting in there, but it was just in the way. I also used the text exchanges among the characters as a kind of guide. I wrote the texts quickly, without having any idea what they were going to say, and in general I followed their lead.
ALH: I was so struck by Zuzu’s assertion that: “Lying on a hardwood floor I owned, under the glow of organic squash, was not a tableau that left room for much sympathy.” Certainly, on the outside, Zuzu seems to have a successful life—she is financially secure, has a beautiful child, a home, a partner. However, her lingering dissatisfactions with her life and the crucial choices she’d made render her heartbreakingly sympathetic to me. How did you balance rendering a character who, in a material sense, is not lacking in much, with the weight of the imbalance she is experiencing inside?
JTK: I was determined to write a narrator with wildly conflicting desires. I wanted a story that preferred distortion and fixation to clarity and stability. I think the novel is less interested in regret than it is in a kind of greed—the desire for more variations on life’s major choices, more chances to make those choices, more chances to be young—than can ever really be available.
ALH: Was the ending of The Other Wife what you’d envisioned from the start of the project, or did it undergo differing iterations? I know for some writers, they begin their works with the ending in mind. Tell us a little about your process of approaching writing and editing the conclusion of a story or novel, and how it’s changed over the years.
JTK: A former professor once advised against knowing where the story ends until you get there. I am certain there are writers who disregard this entirely—and with great success—but for me, it was a luxury to write without having immediate access to how pivotal any given scene might be. A few years ago I tried to write a ten-chapter book with twenty pages in each chapter—I thought having that formal structure would help maintain momentum and pace, but it did nothing in terms of moving the story or helping ideas flourish. It felt like homework. As for the final pages of this novel, I switched the order around several times during the editing process.
ALH: The structure of The Other Wife was another standout for me. The temporal shifting, moving between a mixture of flashbacks and present-day narratives as Zuzu reflects and draws conclusions, is dreamy, evocative, and emotionally haunting. What drew you to this narrative and temporal structure for the book? Did you consider other structural arrangements for this project?
JTK: At one point I wondered if the book should be cleanly divided into two sections—effectively, college and adulthood—but I didn’t want that structure to create an unintended (and inaccurate) sense of cause-and-effect. A central aspect of Zuzu’s character is that she’s always thinking about the past, and so the flashbacks must act as a kind of interruption. Her present-day tasks are slowed down by her obsession—and discomfort—with the passage of time.
ALH: Lastly, what are you most looking forward to at the One Story Ball?
JTK: I’m looking forward to meeting the other debs—I really admire the work they’ve all published in One Story—and I am especially excited to meet editor Patrick Ryan. In the years preceding the publication of my story “Extinction,” I submitted stories that weren’t quite ready, and Patrick responded with such respect for the work. I knew that it would be an enormous privilege to work with him if I ever had the chance.
Alina currently attends NYU’s MFA in Fiction, where she is a full-ride fellowship recipient of the Jill Davis and Departmental Fellowships. She has received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Mendocino Coast Writers and the Juniper Summer Institute, amongst others, and was a 2024 Finalist in the Kenyon Review’s Short Fiction Contest. Alina was an Intern at One Story magazine and Adjunct Professor at NYU. She is currently working on a novel and can be found at @alieenaaaa.
