Please join us for a Q&A with Kayla Rae Whitaker. Her latest book, Returns and Exchanges, was featured in a recent edition of The BookBrowse Review, and her debut novel, The Animators, was named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage.
Kayla will be here to take your questions from July 6 through July 8. Please stop by!
Please help me welcome Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of Returns and Exchanges, to the BookBrowse Community Forum.
Kayla Rae Whitaker is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and New York University. Her first novel, The Animators, was named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage. Her second novel, Returns and Exchanges, was published on May 19, 2026 and featured in the May 20 edition of The BookBrowse Review. She lives in Queens, New York.
Please use this space to ask Kayla questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Kayla: Congratulations on the release of Returns and Exchanges, and thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us. Before we jump into the Q&A, is there anything you’d like to share about yourself?
Hi Kim! It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me to join in on the conversation. I’m happy to chat about Returns and Exchanges, The Animators, my writing process, and anything else that comes up.
A bit about me: I have lived in New York City for most of my adult life, but am originally from a small town in Kentucky (you can tell, too – I still automatically make eye contact and smile at people on the street, which is not quite advisable in a city the size of New York). I wrote Returns and Exchanges in large part because I love big family epics, and I tend to write the sort of books I’d like to read. So if you are looking for a book that invites you into its world to stay awhile, R&E is a good contender. My last novel, The Animators, was published in 2017, so it took time to write and shape this story and I am very happy to talk about that process.
I am also a teacher in addition to being a writer. I believe in craft’s ability to strengthen curiosity and critical thinking in people of any age. I think about why we make things and what that process means to human beings a lot, particularly now that AI is such a force in our lives. Happy to discuss that too, of course.
When I’m not writing or grading papers, I like to read – like all of you – as well as watch movies (there’s a lot of Criterion Collection playing in our house) and explore NYC.
Looking forward to the discussion!
Good morning & welcome (again!). Since you’ve mentioned the length of time that elapsed between the publication of your two books, let’s start there.
What sparked the idea for Returns and Exchanges? Was it something that came to you right after The Animators, or did it take a while for the story to form in your mind?
I got the idea for R&E while shopping at a soon-to-be-closed Sears in 2017 or 2018. It was at a brick-and-mortar mall that was quite nearly dead. This store was maybe two days away from being closed, and it was – eerie. Liquidators had come in to remove fixtures from the walls, collect racks, et cetera. And it was silent. No Muzak or AM Gold playing from the ceiling speakers. It was just me and a group of other people, digging through boxes of merchandise, all of us more or less silent. It was as if we were all mourning something – we’d sensed a death in the room, and were doing our best to navigate around it. And I could not get that experience out of my head. I drove home disquieted.
My first book had come out in 2017, so I knew a bit about what it was like to make something, then send it out into the world with the understanding that you now had little to no control over what the world would do with this thing you made. That’s a difficult experience for anyone. And I could not help but wonder what it might feel like if I’d forged a business, only to watch it shutter like Sears. It would feel terrible, of course. Even for Fran, the Taylor family matriarch, who is sturdy and unsentimental and practical – no one is immune from feeling it when something they made and love flounders out in the world. So that part of the story, at least, was born. Family aims for the American Dream. Family struggles against corporate forces. David and Goliath.
I think we read and write historical fiction to figure out how we got here, to the present moment, and it was a real trip to revise R&E during COVID, at a time when my daily respite was visiting Rite Aid and shooting the breeze with my favorite cashier or saying hi to the floor associates. A store, a business, a local watering hole – they’re all community centers, all human structures. They’re meaningful. We don’t talk enough about the emotional aspect of commerce. There’s shopping as an emotional experience, of course, but there’s also the relationships that form out of buying from and selling to a human being. It’s a social tie.
It’s interesting that you mention shopping in person as an aspect of socializing. I saw a stat this morning that said that “In 2003, Americans spent 284.7 hours socializing and communicating per year; by 2025, that dropped to 211.8 hours.” Although your novel is set in the 80s & 90s, I think we’re continuing to see that consolidation/closing trend.
You mention Fran, who is definitely the heart & soul of R&E. Where did this character come from?
Backing up a bit, I’d love to know more about how your first novel, The Animators, came to be. It’s a huge commitment to create a book from start to finish. How long did it take you to write it, and how did you get it published?
After you completed The Animators, did you feel you wanted to write another book right away, or did it surprise you when the idea for Returns and Exchanges appeared?
Fran is the heart of R&E for me. She’s where the story became itself, and she is where the story ends.
I wanted to write about a matriarchy. I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and there is so much of Appalachian culture that quietly centers on households led by women. I can’t tell you the number of families I have known where Mamaw was the boss – the breadwinner, the raiser of kids (and grandkids), the disciplinarian, the decider. There are so many cultures that are a matriarchy, but part of the matriarchy’s work is concealing that fact. And that is Fran, in a nutshell. She’s the boss, both at home and at the store. Her husband, Fred, knows it. Their kids know it, too. But she’s been raised to be subtle about that fact and to give her husband, and any other man in the room, the credit they think is their due. She’s part of the Silent Generation. It’s likely that Fran wasn’t allowed to open her own bank account until she was past middle age – Fred’s name would have been on absolutely everything official related to the business and their shared lives.
So how does it feel to do all the work just so what you’ve made can “officially” belong to someone else? It’s rough. I wanted to tell the story of someone who lived that life, and then had a discovery – elicited by, frankly, becoming wealthy – and decided that they wanted a bit of agency of their own. And Fran came out of that idea. The height, the red hair, the humor. It’s all her.
I think about women and labor a lot. I think a lot of readers do, too.
I’m going to use the spoiler tag here, since this might be too much of a reveal, but what made you decide to make Fran gay? It really works in the story, for sure, and I think it makes the character more unique and memorable. But I wondered what led to that decision?
(If you want to insert spoilers, use spoiler and /spoiler enclosed in square brackets - so [word] blurred text [/word].)
In fact, you made a number of interesting decisions about your characters - which I think really makes the book. They’re all extremely realistic “people.” Are they based on anyone in particular? How did you develop them? Did they evolve as you crafted them?
My journey with The Animators in general: I began writing it halfway through my graduate work at NYU. In total, it was a seven year process to write the book. I was still a young writer, and in large part was still teaching myself to write a novel (though I would also argue that THAT process never ends).
Animators wasn’t my first novel, incidentally; I wrote a novel as my graduate thesis that never found representation and is still sitting in a desk drawer. Trying to find representation for that book was a difficult experience. Publishing is filled with setbacks. So I felt very fortunate when my agent found the first chapter from Animators in the slush pile. I was connected to my publishers by her. That was where it started.
That’s a great question. I always knew that Fran was a lesbian. It was part of the fabric of her character from the very beginning.[/spoiler] I knew this part of Fran; she came fully formed in this way. Like many women of her generation, she was forced into marriage by way of obligation.The book was shaped around two elements that disrupt the Taylor family’s status quo: their new wealth, and that sense of agency that stems from new wealth galvanizing Fran into being honest about who she is and what she wants. One of my big goals in drafting Fran’s chapters, and her journey into her new life, was balancing her desires with her pragmatism. She knows how much she stands to lose in making the big decisions that define the book. The pull of her desires has to be powerful enough to override her common sense. And the more I put Fran in high-pressure situations, the more her strength and integrity developed. I suppose there’s one message that stands within the book: some things are worth more than money.
I think it is easy for women in 2026 to forget that lives like Fran’s occurred only a short time ago. Again: we write and read historical fiction to figure out how we got here! I value the fact that I can open a line of credit, or a bank account. I value the fact that I can vote. I value the fact that I can make my own choices as to how to live my life. There’s a lot at stake if we forget.
None of these characters are wholly based on real people. The characters I write are often amalgamations of people, places, and problems I have encountered, and the more deeply I write the characters into scenes, the more they evolve and surprise me with their decisions, their compulsions, et cetera. Take Fred, for instance. It takes a little bit of effort to love Fred. But his frailties and insecurities are very human. I think I dug more deeply into Fred’s character specifically because he was harder to love. On the outside, he bears more in common with bullies I have known than anyone else. But bullies are bullies for a reason; they’ve been harmed so deeply that the only way to process that damage is to harm others in turn.
And Birdie! She’s the baby of the family. Her chapter was the quickest I wrote in the whole book. I knew her pretty well before I even stepped inside her voice.
The structure is unique, too. Why did you decide to divide the story into thirds, with the focus being different in each section?
I always saw the book as following (roughly) the classic rags-to-riches arc, and that definitely influenced the structure and whose voice would go where. In the evolution of this family, we have before-money and after-money. In order to get a complete picture of how class status changes the family, all voices are necessary: Fred and Fran, Mom and Dad, in part one, with Josiah and Sam, the oldest Taylor kids, describing the family’s ascent in part two, and Benny and Birdie, the “late in life” kids following with part three, sharing a world that is so fundamentally different from the beginning of the book that it’s stunning.
I wanted each “generation” of kid to have their own approach to money, spending, self-definition, and most importantly, work. This is a story about a family business. How the kids feel about work, earning, labor is important. It also gives a little bit of texture and context to part one when the kids, years later, recall things that happened in the past. It’s creating a sort of history and lore within the world of the book, which I love. It’s always an accomplishment when a book seems to form its own little universe, and that’s what I was going for here. Six perspectives is a lot, but it’s worth it to flesh out this entire world.
Benny and Birdie, the babies, are our guides when things are completely falling apart. And that feels fitting. They are, after all, seeing it for the first time – it’s fresh for them.
Is there a scene in R&E that you particularly enjoyed writing? Which was the most challenging?
Compared to your first book, what was different about the process of writing Returns and Exchanges and getting it published?
How do you balance being a high school teacher and a writer? What influence do your students have on your work, if any?
Those big, pivotal scenes are both hard and satisfying to write, because so much of the plot is culminates in this explosion. The most difficult was the scene close to the book’s end, in which the Triple Crown Drive house is attacked and Birdie shoots Hal Combs. To my mind, that scene is the true result of everything that begins in 1979. This is a book about a family getting rich. But it is also a book about women and labor and fear, and how the gender dynamics playing out in front of us do so much to shape how we see ourselves and the world, for better and for worse. Birdie got to see her mother working like an animal for most of her life, and her core experience of Fred as she became older was as a childish, entitled, and resentful parent. His denial that his PR campaign is not putting his family in danger is bogus. Birdie now knows her dad as someone who would prefer to turn his head and maintain his own peace than actually absorb difficulty and protect his loved ones. And she is forced to physically defend herself as a result. That’s a heartbreak moment – Birdie is what, 17 when this happens? She knows, deep down, that her father has left her to fend for herself. And it shatters the relationship. This is the end, of Birdie and Fred. Women have had to tote the burden in the Taylor family all her life; now it’s her turn. To reiterate the theme mentioned above: if there are things in this world that are more important than money, then there are also things in this world that are more valuable that holding onto one’s sense of hubris.
The most fun scenes to write: the store scenes, of course. I enjoy nerding out with research as much as possible (see Animators work scenes), and being able to block the store, spotlight the merchandise, and orchestrate scenes in that setting was a blast.
I wondered if that was the case. There’s a point where Fran says how much she enjoys creating the story layouts and it sounded personal!
Man, Fred made me soooo mad. I loved all the characters except for him. What a child. I was impressed with how you had Fran realize that he would never understand how his actions were wrong, and how they’d impacted the family.
So how do you know when a book is “done” and ready to go to the publisher? Personally, I’m having a hard time leaving these characters behind. Isn’t it hard for you to move on, after living with these “people” in your head for years?
I feel really lucky that I have two jobs I love. Both teaching and writing are meaningful to me. The school year is a marathon, for sure, and each teacher finds a different means of running that marathon that works for them. And for a writer, that means taking advantage of the time you do have to get as much valuable work done as possible.
Teaching high school classes in particular forces me to look at my own writing and craft in a different way. I have taught undergraduates and graduate students before, as well as craft-specific classes for adults, and while it’s great to step into the weeds of writing fiction, it’s always valuable to go back to the basics of plot, character, setting. But it’s also valuable to reflect on why reading and writing are so important – and it’s because the writing process is also a thinking process, and the act of writing is integral to critical thinking skills. English class is important! It teaches us how to think, and it reminds us to think deeply.
There’s a reason why I wrote a book that is predominantly about women and labor – I think about work, the meaning behind women’s work, labor, and equity issues in labor frequently. Most folks I know have multiple kinds of work they are balancing: familial, professional, creative. The key is balance. My prime writing time is between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, every day, before I go to work, teach, grade papers, design assessments, et cetera. My day is better for that early morning writing time, and my thinking is clearer for it, too.
So if you are working creatively while performing other kinds of work – keep at it! And keep at it joyfully. That’s why we do it, after all.