[5][9] Gyasi recalls being shy as a child, feeling close to her brothers for their shared experiences as young immigrant children in Alabama, and turning to books as her "closest friends".

[8] She was encouraged by receiving a certificate of achievement signed by LeVar Burton for the first story she wrote, which she had submitted to the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest.

At the age of 17, while attending Grissom High School, Gyasi was inspired after reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to pursue writing as a career.

Gyasi traveled to her mother's ancestral Ashanti home in Kumasi, visited with relatives, and toured the Cape Coast Castle, a colonial trading fort used to hold enslaved Africans before boarding ships to the Americas.

[1] The effects of colonialism are tracked through each family member and the historical milestones they live through, including conflict between the Fante and Asante nations, the beginning of cocoa farming in Ghana, plantation slavery in the American South, convict labor during the Reconstruction era, the civil rights movement, and the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

[21] She cites Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain), Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) as inspirations.

She wrote: "While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm.