At the same time that Yaa Gyasi was working on her first novel, her best friend Christina Kim was working on her doctoral thesis in neuroscience.
"I remember reading — or trying to read — this paper she had gotten published and I didn't understand a word of it," Gyasi (pronounced "Jessie") said by phone recently from her home in Brooklyn.
"And that struck me as odd because she was so supportive and encouraging with my work, but yet I felt I didn't have the same access point to her work."
(Kim's paper, published in the journal Cell, was titled "Molecular and Circuit-Dynamical Identification of Top-Down Neural Mechanisms for Restraint of Reward Seeking." There are reasons why it might not be instantly comprehensible.)
So Gyasi asked Kim if she could visit her Stanford University lab. That visit — as Gyasi watched Kim perform delicate surgery on mice brains in order to fathom the brain's response to addiction and depression — eventually became the inspiration for her just-published second novel, "Transcendent Kingdom."
It's the story of Gifty, a Ghanaian-American scientist at Stanford whose family has suffered immense trauma. Gifty's father has abandoned his family and returned to Ghana. Her brother became addicted to opioids after a sports injury and has died of an overdose. Her mother has sunk into a deep depression, and Gifty has become her caretaker.
Raised Pentecostal — and a passionate believer as a child — Gifty has turned away from faith to devote her life to science. Her research into addiction and depression, she insists, has nothing to do with having a depressed mother and an addicted brother. She has left the church, but its influence still colors most things she does.
"I think Gifty is a character who often contradicts herself in that way," Gyasi said. "I think that's really partly a trauma response. She can't look at or touch the place that hurts. She kind of sees around it or uses code names to avoid that trauma of her brother's death."