Tiffany McDaniel: Spilling Secrets

Tiffany McDaniel may be best known as a novelist, but she is also a visual artist and a poet. You can tell by the way she writes: her prose is lyrical and rich with imagery, stoking readers’ imaginations and rousing a childlike curiosity, as when she describes “towering trees” with “branches braiding like cold rivers.” McDaniel grew up in Ohio, in a hometown similar to the fictional place of Breathed, the setting of her novels. In these books, she endeavors to show the different sides of this rural community—how it can be as judgmental and isolating as it is beautiful and serene. The land itself plays an important role in her work. Picturesque scenes offer a surprising contrast to the difficult subjects she tends to explore—racism and sexism, poverty and grief.

McDaniel’s latest novel, Betty, is a book she wrote many years ago, when she was only seventeen years old, but it was just published this summer—four years after her debut, The Summer That Melted Everything. Betty is a heroic coming-of-age story inspired by McDaniel’s own family history, centering on a family secret her mother told her some twenty years ago. It follows her mother—then a young girl named Betty Carpenter, who is one of eight siblings—as she tries to figure out her place in society and within her own family. (McDaniel even uses the real names of her relatives in the book.) Betty’s father, Landon, the town’s plant healer, is Cherokee, and Betty has inherited his talent for storytelling, his love of nature, and his dark skin. Her mother, Alka, is a white woman who finds Betty’s physical resemblance to Landon irritating and often lashes out at her because of it. She calls her daughter “Pocahontas,” and tells her that princesses don’t