"What a Man Do": Coe Booth and the Genesis of Tyrell

I would never have thought I could write a whole book from a boy's point of view. Never. I didn't assume I could do it as I was writing it, either, but I just wrote another chapter and another chapter and all of a sudden it had become a whole book. I didn't know that voice was inside of me. I don't sound anything like iyrell. I don't know where that voice came from. He's talking about rap music and hip hop, and I don't know about those things. It came out of me in this very strange way.

Nevertheless, the voice in Tyrell's first person narration is 100% authentic in language and spirit, so much so that people are often surprised when they meet Coe Booth: "When I do author talks at libraries, sometimes the people there are surprised to find out that I am not a man. I love this because I was worried that boys and men might not find it authentic, not in the real voice of a man."

Coe's characterization of the male voice is insightful even if she doesn't always understand the why of it. It's also funny. She is quite entertained by some of the characteristics:

Men have conversations with each other that are just hysterical to me. They hardly say anything, but they seem to come away with meaning from it, whereas women tend to analyze and discuss things in much greater detail. Men's conversations are so quick. Tyrell has a phone conversation with Cal, for example, that consists of one or two word responses:

"Yo, Cal."

"Ty?"

"What up?"

"Chillin'. Where you at?"

"Bennett."

"Damn, man."

"Word. . ." (58)

I tried to capture that brevity.

Tyrell contains humor, humor about the roaches at the Bennett Motel, humor about the flaws in human nature manifested by the people in Tyrell's life, humor as a coping mechanism. For Coe, humor was an important part of surviving the day to day tragedy and sadness of being an Emergency Children's Services worker, much like the humor police use to survive what might otherwise be insurmountable sadness at the plight of many human beings. "You have to find something to laugh at to survive the tension and sadness or you'll go crazy. I had two cases involving fatalities that I had to deal with, for example, and you have to break the tension somehow or you wouldn't be able to survive." Tyrell's humor comes from an attitude, an attitude that somehow he is going to rise above all this, and if he can just laugh at parts of it, sometimes, he will survive it all.

The book is authentic, the events are informed from real life experiences and the narrator's voice is believable. The most remarkable thing about the book, however, is the language. Coe Booth takes a chance by telling the story in first person in the most realistic language possible, and it works. It works like magic. The voice is in the exact syntax the real Tyrell would speak, captured perfectly by the author's listening ear and released through her pen:

The voice didn't require a lot of revising at all. It just flowed out. It was never a problem. I was concerned at times about where the story was going to go, how it would end, that kind of thing, but the way Tyrell speaks-it just came out.