Great Black Hope: Pursuit of belonging 'becomes a kind of cancer that eats them from the inside out'

Franklin wanted to write about the worlds he had spent years observing since childhood: including how class and race shape even our most intimate relationships. At its centre is David Smith, a young Black man from a Southern bourgeois family. His education, manners and connections give him access, but he is constantly aware of the possibility of being cast out. That tension led him to think about respectability politics and the psychological cost of constantly performing an acceptable version of oneself.