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When Attica Locke wrote “The Exile’s Lament,” her 2012 essay on being from (and leaving) Texas, she was already deep into an incredibly accomplished career. Her debut novel, Black Water Rising, published three years earlier, had been nominated for a half dozen major awards, and its follow-up was hotly anticipated. Working in Hollywood, she’d contributed to film scripts for major studios. But she was nervous, she says, about telling a more personal story. “It just scared the crap out of me,” she recalls. “I’m very comfortable just making things up. I get very nervous about telling the truth.” What Locke turned in was a powerful, clear-eyed—yet tenderhearted—look at both Texas and her adopted home in California. She wrote of taking her family for barbecue in the San…

The post A Novelist and Hollywood Screenwriter Grapples With Her Texan Identity appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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