Naima Coster’s first novel, Halsey Street (starred review, LJ 1/18), offers an unflinching look at a fractured family. In it, Penelope Grand returns to her Brooklyn neighborhood—in the midst of gentrification—to care for her ailing father and try to deal with her mother’s departure to the Dominican Republic. Here, Coster opens up about her New York connections, the concept of home, and more.

Halsey Street is a mother-daughter story and a tale of gentrification. What inspired such a weaving of ideas? I wanted to capture the story of a family and a place. The mother-daughter story sketches out the life of the Grand family across time and different geographies, with the rapidly changing landscape of Brooklyn providing a tense, interesting context in which these women live. The two threads of the book share the same themes of loss, renewal, and belonging, and they come together to form a single story.

How did you choose the women’s names? A friend of mine has a mother named Mireya. I liked the music of the name—all the vowels, and the elastic sound of the “y.” As for Penelope, I simply liked the name enough to keep writing it over and over, and it also reminded me of the Odyssey and homecoming. I wanted to evoke Homer’s Penelope and turn her into a woman who takes journeys, avoids home, and has to find her way back.

Do you have a connection to Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the Grand family lives, and why did you select it as the location for your novel? I lived in Bed-Stuy for a year in my early 20s, and it reminded me of the Brooklyn of my childhood. Once I moved away, I wanted to render the neighborhood I saw and inhabited. If it became the center of the drama of my book, I could stay there a bit longer through the lives of my characters.

You currently live in North Carolina. How does it compare to New York? Where I live now is much greener, and it’s quiet. I love the trees and the trails, and I love the seasons so much more—fall and spring are spectacular. But I miss the density of New York, and the way life in the city throws you in the way of [others]. I have fewer interactions with strangers now, and I miss that difficult, awkward, and sometimes beautiful intimacy of life in the city.

Did the sentiment “you can’t go home again” influence your narrative? I’m interested in home as a state of being as much as a concrete place. Being at home means so much more than going back to a particular house or neighborhood. We may not always be able to return to a certain place, but I think there’s always a possibility to cultivate a sense of belonging, security, and self-acceptance. To me, that is home. I wanted my characters to learn that home is a thing they have the power to create, at least, imaginatively and in their internal lives.

Penelope’s father once owned Grand Records, a neighborhood staple. Did you have spots like that when you were growing up? Grand Records was an invention born out of my interest in how music and expressive culture can conjure community. I was a child and then a very young woman in Brooklyn, and I loved places like the public library in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene Park, and Junior’s, where I could eat cheeseburgers and draw on the paper tablecloths in crayon. Thankfully, those places are all still there.

What’s the story behind your author photo? My husband is a wonderful photographer, and when we lived in New York City, we would go out and take pictures. Now the need for a headshot from time to time gives us an excuse to take out the camera and go for a walk. My most recent author photo was taken on an afternoon in Durham, NC, on the American Tobacco Campus, a commercial area downtown with old tobacco factories. That’s why there is all that beautiful brick in the photograph.

What are you working on now; what’s next for you? I’m always working on essays; I have a few cooking now about family, female friendship, religion, and desire. I’m at work on two book projects, both of them fiction. One is a quest story; the other is a mosaic about a community thrust into a difficult transformation by integration. I’m not sure which I’ll roll out yet, as they’ve both captured my interest and seem to build on the questions—thematic and formal—that I started thinking through while writing Halsey Street.—Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY