Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has had problems with addiction, including myself’
The novelist talks about his hit debut There There, and the shocking historical discovery about his tribe that inspired his follow-up novel
Tommy Orange was in Sweden, promoting a translated edition of his first novel, There There, when inspiration struck for a second time. Orange’s debut was published in 2018 to enormous acclaim: it was selected as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year, listed as a Pulitzer prize finalist and won the American Book award. The pressure to follow that early success must have been immense. But then, visiting a Swedish museum, “I saw this newspaper clipping about my tribe being in Florida in 1875. And I know enough about my tribal history to know that we were never in Florida.”
Except, it turns out, they were. Orange, born in Oakland, California in 1982, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Members of his tribe, he discovered, were held as prisoners in a Florida jail that became the blueprint for the notorious “boarding schools” in which Native children were forcibly assimilated into white culture.
