Naima Coster: You Have to Like the Work

Naima Coster is a New York Times bestselling author and a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honor. Her new novel, Take What You Can, will be published by Viking in August 2026. Her novel, What’s Mine and Yours, was a Read with Jenna pick, a statewide read for One Maryland One Book, longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, Esquire, Marie Claire, Ms. Magazine, and more.

Her first novel, Halsey Street, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and named a must-read by People, Essence, Well-Read Black Girl, The Skimm, and the Brooklyn Public Library. Naima’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, Time, Kweli, and The Cut, and in numerous anthologies. Naima teaches creative writing at CUNY Baruch College. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. 

In this interview, Naima discusses a major perspective change in the drafting process, the importance of France, and more.

Name: Naima Coster
Literary agent: Kristyn Keene Benton, Empire Literary
Book title:Take What You Can
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books / Viking / PRH
Release date: August 4, 2026
Genre/category: Literary fiction
Previous titles: Halsey Street (2018); What’s Mine and Yours (2021)
Elevator pitch: Take What You Can is the story of two lifelong friends, Milly and Val, who decide to move near one another when they’re both pregnant so that they can raise their girls together. But their bond is threatened by the class differences that have emerged between them, the demands of new motherhood and strained marriages, as well as the rift that started years ago when they were college students studying abroad in France and were taken under the wing of an older, wealthy woman named Helene, who became a surrogate mother to them both and is no longer in their lives.

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

When I first became a mother, I found myself thinking obsessively about money and privilege—what I had, what I didn’t, and what I wanted. And so, I started to write about class mobility and class envy, and the way that parenthood can bring differences in money and privilege between friends into even sharper focus. The novel became a vessel for all those themes, and it also grew into a larger story about what it’s like to mother without a mother of your own, and how hard it can be to build and cherish a chosen family.

It took five years and five drafts to go from idea to publication, and the book changed radically. I didn’t realize, at first, the novel would focus so much on grief. I knew I wanted to write about Val and Milly and how they navigate their first year of motherhood, but it also became vital to look at their pasts and who they were as daughters. Val is estranged from her abusive mother; Milly’s adoring mother died of cancer when she was 20. To understand the hopes and fears and baggage both women bring into their relationship with each other, I had to write about how loving and losing their mothers shaped them.

The book was originally from three points of view! It followed Val, Milly, and the woman they hire to care for their daughter: Cleo. It was my editor who first suggested it be from only two points of view, and while I was unsure at first, the more I sat with her note, the more I could see how it would allow me to look much more closely at the two best friends who are the heart of the novel. Cleo, however, is still important to the story. Val and Milly covertly compete for her allegiance, and she is an echo of Helene, the affluent, American ex-pat they meet in France, who first brought them together, and whose absence they can’t talk about. 

I was surprised by how important France and travel became to the novel. I knew I wanted to write about money and motherhood in Brooklyn, New York, specifically Park Slope, the neighborhood in which I unexpectedly found myself as a new mother. But the more I wrote about Milly and Val abroad, the more I wanted to use the settings in Paris and the south of France to explore the themes of class, travel, adventure, pleasure, and freedom. The scenes in France became a wonderful way to set up a contrast between what Val and Milly expect of their futures when they’re broke 20-year-olds traveling abroad and the realities they find themselves in as new mothers in their mid-30s.

I hope readers will leave the book thinking about enduring friendship, and how rewarding and hard it is to choose to remain someone’s person through all the phases of life when you aren’t bound by blood or marriage. The book asks questions I hope will have relevance for my readers’ lives, such as: How do you stay close to someone when your lives take divergent paths? When a change in your own life, like becoming a parent, swallows you up? How do you stay close when there are things you don’t know how to talk about—things that have happened between the two of you, or events from your past? What does it take to really know someone, and to let yourself be known?

My advice to other writers is to make sure you’re writing what you want to write. Yes, writing is work, and it takes discipline, but there also has to be pleasure and play and freedom in the process. It has to be for you first, not for some imagined reader, or publisher, or critic. You have to like the work—not necessarily to finish it—but to have the motivation and will to go deep and far enough that the book can become what it’s meant to be.