How author Leilani Garrett’s personal journey fuels her literary pursuits
Leilani Garrett lives in southeast Evanston and retired from a career in technology sales. She also found time to write a novel, After The Burn, which was published in August 2024.
She always knew
she was adopted
Garrett grew up in a middle class Black neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. Her mother worked independently cleaning homes and her father worked at a meat packing plant in town.
She knew from about the age of eight years old she was adopted. Her younger brother was also adopted. Garrett said the story her parents were told was the birth mother of their two children was a white piano prodigy studying at the University of Nebraska; the birth father was Black, but they didn’t know any details. The student’s parents did not want the birth mother to keep either child.
Garrett later learned that she and her brother do not share any DNA. She also has no aptitude for piano, despite years of lessons. She doesn’t know if the adoption agency knew the story was false, but said that what her parents were told was not true.
Over the years, even after marrying and getting ready to start her own family, Garrett had no interest in trying to find either of her birth parents. She said she held no animosity toward them, but wasn’t curious to find out who they were or learn about her personal backstory.
Connection through Ancestry DNA
In 2019, her son gave her an Ancestry DNA kit. She submitted her DNA and learned she was nearly 50% Northern or Eastern European. She had a bit of an identity crisis, but said, “Regardless of what the numbers say I am, who I am, my experience has been, what my experience has been. I grew up a Black girl.”
A few months later she got a hit on Ancestry and an email. The email was from a Black woman researching her family’s genealogy. When they finally spoke, she told Garrett, “I think you’re on my mother’s side as my second cousin. I’m gonna figure this out.”
When the woman got back in touch with Garrett, she was calling from a family party where she had shared Garrett’s photo with the group. Suddenly she had several hundred new family members, mostly based in Georgia, who were eager to meet her. Her primary contact, the cousin marshaling the genealogy research, had built a family tree with more than 1500 names going back to the 1800s. The family had identified her birth mother, a relative who had died of a brain aneurysm more than 20 years earlier. None of the relatives knew their kin had had a child that had been placed for adoption.
Garrett has talked to and met some of the new relatives when they have visited Chicago. She is taking it slowly. “It has settled into my heart and head and my psyche, and so I don’t view it quite as startling until I start to talk about it,” Garrett said.
Information about her birth father, beyond the fact that he is white, is still a mystery. Occasionally the Ancestry site offers up clues of people reaching out to her. Garrett said when she feels ready, she’ll pursue those avenues.
Writing a novel
Garrett graduated from Creighton University, a private Jesuit university in Omaha, and majored in journalism. After she graduated, she sold ads for a local radio station then relocated with her then fiancé to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She applied for and was accepted for a sales job at IBM, where she worked for 15 years. After she left IBM, she worked at Microsoft, followed by positions at Oracle, LinkedIn and Gartner.
Garrett’s novel After The Burn tells the story of Elle Rollins, a Black successful technology salesperson who experiences crises at work and in her personal life. Her longtime lover suddenly becomes evasive and unavailable. Then Elle meets a much younger man who is wildly interested in her. How does Elle’s respond to this new potential love interest? How can she defend her livelihood? With support from a corporate mentor, a group of devoted girlfriends and memories of her mother’s lessons, Elle navigates through these events without losing her self-respect.
Kirkus Reviews described After The Burn as, “A satisfying read about finding fulfillment in career and love.” This fictional tale of love and corporate intrigue is a great read for those looking for an escape.
Mix of fact and fiction
How much of Elle is Garrett?
She said, “Everything that Elle believes and feels and thinks is, I mean, she a real clear reflection of me. The circumstances she finds herself in and the choices she makes, some of those are imaginary and fictional. Some of them are not. So it’s a really a mixture of, like a personal narrative and then a lot of imaginary stuff.”
The mix of real and imaginary details is consistent throughout the book. Her character arranges for takeout from Hecky’s. The apartment Elle lives in is based in Evanston and described in sumptuous detail. Garrett said, “I did embellish a bit, but for the most part it’s an expression of where I live.” Everest, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago where a climactic scene takes place, is based on an actual restaurant of the same name that closed in 2020.
Garrett is working on a new novel. She wrote in an email, “I’m two chapters in on a historical novel about women in Texas during the time of the oil rush. It is based loosely on the history I learned from the mother who raised me, about the women in her early life.”
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