American author Tayari Jones has been keeping a big secret about her new book, An American Marriage, for a very long time – or at least it seemed that way. In October 2017, Jones got a phone call that changed her life. Oprah Winfrey was on the line, telling her that An American Marriage had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club. But there was a catch. Jones couldn’t tell anyone until the book was published months later, in February 2018.
“So you have to sit on the secret a long time,” Jones, 47, says in a phone interview from Atlanta, Georgia, the United States.