Former MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor took a 10-year break from writing novels to focus on rediscovering her voice.
Now she’s back with her third book, “Paper Gods,” a political thriller based in Atlanta.
“I think I needed to understand my own voice and form,” said Taylor, currently an editor-at-large for The Daily Beast. “I took time to revisit the craft.”
Between novels, Taylor the mother of three and grandmother of two, wasn’t sitting still.
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She worked for an advertising agency, hit the commentary circuit on television, wrote for magazines, a family memoir and worked on a documentary about her native St. Louis.
“I did a lot of really cool things,” said Taylor, author of “In My Father’s House” and “The January Girl.”
The main character in her new book of fiction, which has been picked up by St. Martin's Press, is Mayor Victoria Dobbs Overstreet, a Harvard-trained attorney. According to a description of the novel, which is set in 2014, when her mentor is gunned down at a local church, authorities find a strange piece of origami–a “paper god”–tucked inside his Bible.
“These paper gods turn up again and again, always after someone is killed. Someone is terrorizing those who are close to Mayor Dobbs, and she can't shake the feeling that the killer is close to her.”
Taylor said she wanted to tell an Atlanta story from an insider’s point of view. The view of someone who had “lived here, loved here and worked here.”
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She’s worked on a number of campaign, so knows the city well.
Taylor resisted calls to write her third book on the current happenings in Washington.
"I resisted writing about our political environment," she said. "I think there are more learned people than me who have things to say on how we can chart our path forward."
Plus, "I'm just too darned angry and I can't just get my arms around why we're here."
In “Paper Gods,” Taylor said her characters are over-the-top but not based on anyone in particular. Instead, they’re based on a collection of people that she’s encountered over the years.
Sure, the names are easily recognizable in Atlanta- there’s a Loudermilk and a Dobbs, but they are not tied at all to the families that bear those names.
“I wanted people to have their own temples of their familiars,” she said.
She said there is already talk about a television series based on the book, which will be published in October 2018.
“Atlanta is complicated place, like every other American city,” she said. “But it’s a city, that for all its flaws, is still very beautiful to me.”
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