“When I Was the Greatest” does not draw directly on Reynolds’s relationship with his own father. (“It’s not that he was absent—it’s that I did not want him around when I was young,” he said.) But their cycles of intimacy and estrangement provide some of the emotional groundwater of the book and its portrayal of a fatherless household. In all of his novels, Reynolds borrows liberally from reality, fictionalizing his own life and the lives of friends and family. “This is all true,” he often says. “These are all my personal stories.” The question of what to write, he said, is premised on locating a shared emotional truth with his reader: “If I feel it, other people feel it too, right?”
In April of this year, Reynolds paid a virtual visit to students at Coalinga Middle School, in central California, from his sunny home office. His oversized Library of Congress medal was conspicuous hanging from his neck. He explained his role as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature: “What I’m supposed to do is encourage all the young people to read and write, right?” He continued, “If my teen-age homie don’t like to read, and I show up and I’m, like, ‘Hey, I know you don’t like reading, but guess what I’m getting ready to tell you? You got to read,’ they’re going to say . . . ‘No.’ That doesn’t work.”
Rather than arguing on behalf of books, Reynolds proselytizes about narrative. Storytelling, he contends, is a means of reflecting, comprehending, and validating the self, which is more important than an education in the classics. (In a 2019 video for the Scholastic publishing company, called “The Power of Story,” Reynolds says, “I’m actually not even sure that I’ve seen myself in a book as of yet. . . . You name me one contemporary fiction novel about a thirty-five-year-old heterosexual Black man. But they don’t exist. It’s not a thing. I’m still invisible. I was invisible when I was a kid and I’m invisible as an adult.”) Addressing the Coalinga students, Reynolds said, “Let’s talk about you and the stories that you have, right?” He gestured at the bookcases behind him. Young people are told “that these are the important stories, these are the ones that are going to make them whole and make them smart and make them this, that, and the third. But really they’ve got their own stories, their own narratives.”
A seventh grader named Sean asked him about the inspiration for “Ghost” (2016), the opening novel in the “Track” series, which is centered on a sprinter named Castle. The first time we see Castle running, it’s not during a race—he and his mother are escaping his father, who is wielding a gun. Reynolds explained that the scene was drawn from the life of a friend. “We’re more than our traumatic moments,” he told the students. “We have just as many triumphs as we do trauma.”
Most students ask Reynolds the same handful of questions: what inspires him, what sports he loved as a kid. He has made an art of not quite answering, so that they tell him instead about their basketball practice or favorite video games. He has an easy, natural manner with kids, speaking to them not as an authority figure but, rather, as a co-conspirator. He insists that all questions are fair game, sometimes to the dismay of the teachers or librarians in attendance. Does he know any famous people? (“Y’all are cooler than them, that’s for sure.”) Is he rich? (“So, there’s nothing wrong with being rich as long as you understand what that money is for—making sure your family is good, right?”)
In June, I watched Reynolds with students from Arundel High School, in Maryland. He contorted his frame to peer into the screen, approximated eye contact by staring into the camera’s green light, and fiddled with a pencil as he committed the kids’ names to memory, then recited them back. I heard a lighter timbre than usual in his laugh. Later, I spoke with Bunmi Omisore, a seventeen-year-old then in her junior year, who was in the audience. She discovered Reynolds’s books in elementary school. “I spent a lot of time at the library, just because it was free and you can be there from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.,” she said. “It’s kind of hard, especially if you’re into young-adult novels, to find ones that have Black main characters who actually talk like Black people or who aren’t going through a traumatic event.”
The idea of fiction as mirror is important to Omisore. “I want to be the main character,” she said. More pressingly, she looks for books that distill quotidian Black experience. “You need stories to not only prove to Black readers that they have an identity outside of Blackness but to prove that to white readers. Because a lot of my white teachers and classmates, their perception of the Black experience is so warped, because all they come into contact with are books of struggle and pain.”
Reynolds’s books neither center on pain nor ignore it; they understand it as an aspect of life. In “Patina” (2017), one of the “Track” novels, the title character is a twelve-year-old girl whose biological mother has lost her legs to diabetes and cannot care for her children. Patina is profoundly affected by this, but she is still consumed by the rites of girlhood, like braiding hair and negotiating competitive friendships. In “Ghost,” Castle is almost killed by his father, but the book is more interested in the boy’s building of bonds with his teammates or navigating dilemmas of conscience, as when he decides to steal a pair of running shoes. “I knew that I could just ask my mother to get them for me,” Castle thinks, “and she would because she felt like this track thing was gonna keep me out of trouble. But when I saw how much they cost . . . I just couldn’t ask her for them. I just couldn’t.” The moral complexity of the moment is characteristic of Reynolds’s work: Castle’s act is motivated at once by base material desire and by his love for his mother. Like many of Reynolds’s protagonists, Castle is the hero of his story, but his creator doesn’t give him the burden of being heroic.
There are good and less good fathers in Reynolds’s fiction, but the mothers get more of his love. It’s not that his mothers are sainted or simplistic, but rather that the attention he pays to them captures the fervor of a child’s feeling for a parent. In “Ghost,” Castle is shaken to learn that a teammate’s mother died giving birth to him. “My mother isn’t always the happiest lady on earth, but that’s just because times have been tough. But I’d rather have tough times with her than no times at all. Sunny ain’t never even met his mom. Never even had her cooking, and all moms can cook (when they’re not too tired).” In “The Boy in the Black Suit” (2015), the protagonist, Matt, takes a job at a funeral home after the death of his mother. At night, Matt soothes himself to sleep with repeat plays of Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” a paean to maternal love: “I laid on my back with my earbuds in and that song on repeat, staring up into the darkness, imagining there was no ceiling, or roof, or clouds, until there really was no ceiling or walls, and I was no longer in my small bedroom, but instead in some strange dream.”
Reynolds told me that, during the question-and-answer session at his Library of Congress inauguration, in January, 2020, a little boy piped up: “What’s your most favorite thing to do with your mother?” (Included in Reynolds’s Twitter bio: “I love my mama. And I love you. Unless you don’t love my mama. Then we got problems.”) After the ceremony, the boy tracked him down. Reynolds went on, “Then he says, ‘Because me and my mother, we go on this vacation every year.’ He wanted to tell me about this, publicly, in front of his friends, this little Black boy from D.C.—‘I want to tell you about the things that I love to do with my mother.’ ”
In June, I had lunch with Reynolds and his mother at a steak house in D.C. Isabell, who is in her seventies, described her son as a boy who would speak up on behalf of others. “If we were out to eat and his brother would want something, when the waitress came by—‘Excuse me, excuse me. Could my brother have some more?’ ”
“My older brother,” Reynolds added.
Isabell spent her entire career at the same insurance company, simultaneously studying part time at the University of the District of Columbia; it took her years to earn her degree, in education. Her son’s bedtime routine included the affirmation “I can do anything.” She told me, “I instilled that in him when he was just a little thing—he could barely say his prayers.” She turned to Reynolds. “I think that sort of got into you.”
Reynolds mentioned a time, years ago, when he complained to her of being tired and she said, “You know, son, sometimes I look at you and I feel bad, because I made you a machine.” He still marvels at how frankly she spoke to him when he was a teen-ager, especially about sex: “What are you doing? How are you doing it? Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it so I can make sure you’re being safe and responsible. Let’s talk about the girls. Let’s talk about drugs. Let’s talk about anything.” He told me, “Everything I know about being a man came from a woman.”
Walter Dean Myers, a novelist for young readers and a previous National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, wrote a damning Op-Ed for the Times in 2014, months before his death, about the lack of Black characters in literature for children. Myers was a voracious reader into his teens—Shakespeare, Balzac, Joyce—but, he wrote, “as I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. . . . What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.” Reynolds’s first novel was published that year, and it’s tempting—but reductive—to view his body of work as an ongoing response to the question posed in Myers’s editorial: “Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?”
Parents and educators rely on books to teach the alphabet or how to use the toilet; they make narratives out of shoe-tying or learning to share. I’m the father of two boys, both Black. My husband is white and I’m South Asian, so neither of us can offer a firsthand model of Black selfhood to our children. I’m perhaps too dependent on books to assist in this. Shortly after we adopted our older son, Simon, I bought Ezra Jack Keats’s legendary picture books, all featuring the same adorable Black boy: “The Snowy Day,” “Whistle for Willie,” “Peter’s Chair.” Simon always preferred stories about cars and trucks.
My sons’ shelves are filled with picture books that they’ve long outgrown, but I keep them on hand because they feature Black children. If you’re choosing books based on the presence of Black faces, you’ll end up with a lot of biographies of civil-rights leaders and tales about slavery. My household has plenty of these, but our favorite books are about the small stuff of childhood: “Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut,” by Derrick Barnes, about Black boys visiting the barbershop, or “Green Pants,” by Kenneth Kraegel, about a kid and his favorite item of clothing.
Reynolds wants to show his readers something they will recognize. “I write to Black children,” he said, “but I write for all children.” He is vocal about his love of his own Blackness and sees that as the essential political stance of his fiction. “My characters are not actually concerned about white people,” he said. “I think I can count on one hand the number of white people that exist in my books. The way that I’m addressing race is by creating Black worlds.”
An exception is “All American Boys,” published in 2015 and co-written with Brendan Kiely, a white writer of young-adult novels. He and Reynolds met when they were both on a book tour in 2014. “Jason told me about how his mother called him and said, in so many words, ‘Jason, you’re travelling around the country—I’m worried that there might be a George Zimmerman out there,’ ” Kiely recalled. “And I was thinking about how my mother didn’t call me. There’s no reason for my mother, who’s white, to call her white son and have that same fear.” The book alternates between the perspectives of Rashad, a Black high schooler attacked by police after a false accusation of shoplifting, and Quinn, a white classmate who witnesses the assault. The novel examines racism and police misconduct but is cannily designed not to offend: Rashad is a middle-class R.O.T.C. kid whose own father was once a cop. “All American Boys” is a boon to librarians and teachers who want to provide young readers with stories that illuminate what they see in the headlines. “We knew this book was going to be perennial, that it would continue to be relevant because of the state of the country,” Reynolds told me. It has been one of his most successful books, selling eight hundred thousand copies to date.
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