Another installment of OTBKB's occasional feature, Why I Wrote this Book, where Brooklyn authors share their latest work.

WHY I WROTE SIGNIFYING NOTHING
By Clifford Thompson

When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in Washington, D.C., my grandmother lived with our family. She was very old, and from my earliest memories she was practically deaf. She was a beloved member of the family, but every move the family made had to be planned around her, because she couldn’t be left by herself.

Fast-forward three decades to Brooklyn, where I am writing a novel about a guy named Lester: 19 years old, developmentally disabled, and mute. Lester has never said a word, until the day he suddenly begins rapping at the top of his lungs, throwing his family into a tizzy. Even more than before, his parents, brother, and sister have to figure out what to do about Lester, which leads to conflicts with one another. I had written about a third of the story when it occurred to me that I was really writing about . . . my grandmother.

I think Signifying Nothing will appeal to anyone who has issues with members of his or her own family — in short, anyone.

Excerpt from Signifying Nothing:

“On a spring evening in 1979, in the house where he had lived all of his nineteen years, Lester Hobbs did what no one had ever heard him do: he spoke. One moment he was galumphing across the living room in his undershirt and jeans, skinny arms swinging, hands trembling slightly as they sometimes did; the next, he stopped, arms going stiff at his sides, neck craning forward, a fierce expression taking over his normally placid, baby-smooth brown face. His words were not spoken in the soft, halting way that a thirteen-month-old says “Momma” for the first time; they were full-throated, even loud, like the words of a man accustomed to speaking authoritatively, a drill sergeant or film director. Even more surprisingly, they not only made sense — they were delivered with rhyme and rhythm. In short, the boy was rapping . . .”