Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel Queenie was a breakthrough hit when it first came out in 2018. It tells the story of Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old Black journalist living in south London and finding her footing after a split from her boyfriend. The novel pushes forth pivotal questions about race, mental health and navigating the trenches of early adulthood.
For the author, whose work has garnered praise from everyone from Library Journal to Candace Bushnell, the idea for the book hit in a somewhat high-pressure environment: a car ride on the way to romance novelist JoJo Moyes’ house, where Carty-Williams was attending a writer’s retreat.
“I brought a friend’s car and I drove there,” Carty-Williams tells PEOPLE of the 2016 trip to the Me Before You writer’s English countryside home. “I hadn’t driven since I passed my test a couple of years before, and I remember thinking, ‘Okay, cool. So now we’re doing this. We should come up with an idea of what we want to write about.’”
Emil Huseynzade
“I was like, ‘What do I know best? I know women. I know Black women. I know what it means to not have all the answers, and to be a mess, and to be trying your best and it not really working out for you,’” she continues. “In my head, Queenie was kind of born on the way there.”
Five years after its original publication, Queenie is now becoming a Hulu show. Premiering on June 7, the eight-episode series features a cast led by Dionne Brown as Queenie; Carty-Williams also serves as a showrunner and executive producer.
Becoming an author, however, used to be one of the last things on her mind.
“You could not have told young me, ever, that I would write anything or be known for anything,” Carty-Williams says. “I think I’ve always just wanted to work in places that I can make a difference.”
The author, who previously worked in book publishing, founded the Guardian and 4th Estate 4thWrite Short Story Prize for underrepresented writers before the runaway success of Queenie.
‘Queenie’ by Candice Carty-Williams
Working on the TV adaptation didn’t come without its surprises, either. Despite struggling to figure out how to fit a thousands-word-long novel into eight, 23-minute episodes, and navigating between the show’s various stakeholders and production companies (“How do you make three sets of people happy?”), Carty-Williams says that she managed to play to her strengths throughout the process.
“Being that people person, and being like, ‘Hey, I can’t do that, but what I can do is this’ … you form relationships in that way,” she says. “It was making sure, always, that Queenie was true to who I knew that I wanted her to be. I wanted her to represent what I set out to say, and what I set out to do, all of those years ago.”
A protagonist like Queenie, the author notes, was a rare thing in Britain at the time. And Carty-Williams, who watched Black-led TV shows like Insecure and Chewing Gum for inspiration while drafting the novel, says that’s still true today.
Latoya Okuneye/Lionsgate
“I’m still yet to see a character like her, which makes me feel sad, in that we should have more of these characters,” the author says. “It should be commonplace to see Black women who are making mistakes, and who are learning and trying their best.”
“But it’s really nice to see Queenie fly the flag of being that Black woman who doesn’t have to be strong in a world that, I think, still demands that we are strong, that we have everything together,” she adds.
On the heels of the Hulu series and her second novel, 2022’s People Person, Carty-Williams admits that she isn’t sure where her next book will take her. She’s covered trauma and modern dating in her first novel, and complex sibling dynamics in her second, but pivoting to a genre that she’s loved for a while, she says, could be her next move.
“Horror is the thing that I love the most, and horror is what I watch the most, what I engage in the most,” she says. “I’ve written these novels and TV shows that deal with identity and mental health — because that is the way of the world and that’s where we are — but I’d love to be able to flex my horror brain and get into something that is actually really scary.”
Emil Huseynzade
And while seeing one’s protagonist come to the small screen may be frightening for some, Carty-Williams says that she’s taking any uncertainties about her beloved character head-on.
“When people talk to me about Queenie, they want her to have everything together and they want me to have written her in a certain way,” Carty-Williams says. “But I didn’t and I didn’t want to, and that’s not who she was meant to be.”
“I think that it’s okay for me to sit in that space where I’ve written a character that people are almost still uncomfortable seeing,” she continues. “But she exists. And she would have to exist if I was going to write her. She couldn’t just come from nowhere.”
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All episodes of Queenie will be available to stream on Hulu on June 7.
