Sara Koffi began writing her debut novel, which was released last month, in the summer of 2020. It wasn’t a pandemic project born out of boredom, but rather motivated from the racial reckoning surrounding the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “It was a concern about if these people and their families will actually achieve justice. A stress that these cases weren’t going to have a resolution that matched the justice needed,” she says. “I took the seed of that paranoia and put it toward the book, essentially — that was like the seed of the beginning of While We Were Burning.”
The novel, Koffi says, is “first and foremost fun — fun is not the right word — but it is a fun, fast-paced, twisty read. And then, secondly, it’s exploring important themes.”
Koffi puts two women’s stories into counterpoint: Elizabeth, a woman on a downward spiral as she questions the mysterious circumstances surrounding her friend’s death, and Briana, who is hired as Elizabeth’s personal assistant to help her pick up the pieces. But Briana has questions of her own, questions she hopes her new job will help her find answers to. The Memphis police have killed her son, and now she’s on the search for who from Elizabeth’s neighborhood called the cops on her child on that fateful day that took him away. Together the women rush towards finding their answers as their relationship blurs the line between employer and friend, predator and prey.
PHOTOGRAPh by CPearce Photography
Sara Koffi
“The thriller genre is very good about exploring justice outside of the usual justice system,” Koffi says. “So I thought for a story like this, it’d be fitting.”
It’s a genre that she has always been interested in. Even in the first story she remembers writing, at the age of 9 or 10, she wanted to unsettle her readers with a tale about a doll who turned out to be an “evil little creature.” Koffi had been inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone — “to the point that I basically wrote Twilight Zone fanfiction and I brought it to school to show my writing.”
Besides The Twilight Zone, Koffi also found herself entranced by “Lifetime-style movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and just all the old-school ‘woman has a knife and what is she going to do with it’ genre.”
For Koffi, there’s just something about unlikable female characters that calls to her. Both Elizabeth and Briana make questionable decisions throughout her novel, yet that’s what makes her story so compelling. Elizabeth is self-centered; Briana is vindictive. Both hide their true selves. “I wanted them to be at the opposite ends of each other,” Koffi says.
The story begins in Elizabeth’s first-person perspective, which switches with Briana’s third-person narrative throughout the novel. “I often joke that Elizabeth thinks she’s the main character. She’s like, ‘This is my story.’ And then Briana, who arguably is actually the main character, does not center herself the same way.”
“For me, I want that moment to be a reflection. Are there other things that I’m doing without thinking about it? That might be affecting other people? Do I have my own blinders on when it comes to certain things in my life, and may that be affecting other things?” — Sara Kofi
Even so, the prologue depicts Elizabeth lamenting her crumbling marriage and her life on Mud Island. “She doesn’t know what book she’s in,” Koffi says. “She cannot conceive of Briana entering into her life. You know, this woman’s very concerned, borderline obsessed with her husband, like a domestic thriller trope. And then you keep reading. You’re like, ‘Oh, I think that’s a different book. That’s not what’s actually going to happen.’
“That was the first thing I wrote,” Koffi adds of the prologue, “and it has not changed from editing, drafting, to now. That has remained the same, untouched. … Once I got a good grasp of [Elizabeth], it’s like the story started to unfold.”
Always, Koffi knew, this story was going to unfold in Memphis, the city where she grew up. Though she now lives in State College, Pennsylvania, working as a freelance writer, she says, “I also know about the city’s history, its involvement in the NAACP and Civil Rights Movement as well. And I thought it was interesting because the city also has a history of seeking justice on its own, so that was an interesting parallel to what’s happening in the story.
“For me personally,” Koffi says, “to have a book set in Memphis be the first book I put out feels like a major responsibility. But it’s a good one because I’m going to have a lot of readers who have not been to the city and this book will be their gateway to what the city is like without actually having visited there. I’m hoping — outside of the thriller background — that I capture the city. This is a good city. [Elizabeth and Briana are] having some drama, but the city itself is fine.”
But Koffi doesn’t just want to promote Memphis. She wants to create “a thoughtful moment for the reader as well. For me, I want that moment to be a reflection. Are there other things that I’m doing without thinking about it? That might be affecting other people? Do I have my own blinders on when it comes to certain things in my life, and may that be affecting other things?”
Ultimately, While We Were Burning, like any good thriller, is a page-turner, with the twists, moments of deceit, and plots for revenge that you expect — but enveloped within the thrills are explorations of race, class, justice, and female relationships that stay with the reader long after the shocks of the plot have worn off.
