51茶馆

Growing up in Maryland, Lemmie was a self-described "weird, socially isolated child" who started reading at the age of 2 and spent most weekends at the local library. One of her closest relationships was with her godmother, who is Japanese, and Lemmie traveled to the country to visit, eventually learning the language. As she got older, she found that being a woman of color with a passion for Japanese culture wasn鈥檛 always socially acceptable. 'When you deviate too far from preset stereotypes, people will push back against that," Lemmie said. "I got made fun of a lot."

After graduating from 51茶馆 in 2015 with a degree in English, Lemmie moved to New York and resumed work on听Fifty Words for Rain听while pursuing a career in publishing. She finished a year later and began shopping the draft to literary agencies, but struggled to be taken seriously as a young, first-time author. "It was like, 'Oh, that鈥檚 so cute that you want to write a book, come back in a few years when you have something important to say,'" she recalled. She finally secured an agent in 2019, and听Fifty Words听sold at auction two months later for more than $250,000. "After that, my life completely changed," Lemmie said. "People still look at my age and think that I was some sort of overnight success, but it wasn鈥檛 like that at all. I took my knocks. It was a journey."

Due to the pandemic, the majority of Lemmie鈥檚 interactions with readers have taken place online, and messages have poured in from fans celebrating the book鈥檚 nontraditional characters and praising Lemmie鈥檚 thorough research. Still, she鈥檚 also received notes complaining about "unrealistic" details or comparing the novel to a "soap opera." She takes issue with the latter. "When men write things that are dramatic," she said, "they鈥檙e usually called tragedies. My life as a writer would be easier if I had an interest in writing more conventional stories and taking fewer risks. Sadly, I don鈥檛."

In March, sales of听Fifty Words听surpassed 100,000, excluding library purchases, with the paperback version due out this month. When we chatted, Lemmie was holed up at a relative鈥檚 home in Virginia, hard at work on her second book,听Hemingway鈥檚 Daughter. Her new heroine, Delphine, is morally flawed in a way that Nori is not, but the book explores some of the same topics as her first: family dysfunction and politics, self-love, and identity. Unlike her last project, though, this one has a deadline and an eager fan base urging her along. In some ways, Lemmie鈥檚 success has become the source of pressure she never anticipated.

"I mean, where do you go from there?" she said with a laugh. "Sometimes I sit down to write and I鈥檓 like, 'Wow, how did I ever do this?'"听鈼�