They can be prickly and dark, and are often irreverent about their blackness. They are the kind of women who pepper phrases borrowed from French into already erudite English. Many of its protagonists are well-educated black women. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? includes 15 stories in addition to the title one and was published in December 2016.
Nina named the collection after the 25-page, third person narrative that serves as the collection’s anchor. She assembled and lightly edited some of the most fully formed pieces into a collection and sold it to Harper Collins’ imprint Ecco. When she did, Nina found letters and journals, an unfinished novel of more than 700 pages, several screenplays and stage plays, old family photographs, and many short stories. It wasn’t until the failure of her marriage, during her thirties, that she felt an irresistible urge to confront her mother’s work. For nearly 20 years, Nina kept a trunk of her mother’s papers stored everywhere she lived, but left it unopened. She adopted her younger brother, got married, and had four children of her own. Nina Collins, Kathleen’s daughter, was then 19.
The author of the collection, New Jersey-born Kathleen Collins, was a feverishly hard working polymath who died at 46 in 1988. A collection of revelatory, lyrical yet plot-driven pieces of short fiction, it happens to include insights and observations about living in a society where race matters. In many ways, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? isn’t about interracial love at all.
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