Author: SHE LIT EDITOR

I started she lit in 2016 as a personal blog to describe my adventures in Los Angeles aspiring to be novelist while holding down a day job as a news editor and engaging with other readers on the hottest books of the moment. From my love of creating news and features content, I reshaped she lit into a blog for women looking for interesting stories on the books they’re reading, the authors they’re following, and everything in between. Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | shewrites@shelit.com.

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what's lit

Marketing Maven Arian Simone Shares How Barnes & Noble Picked Up Her Self-Published Book

Arian Simone recently announced the inspirational book she self-published earlier this year earned a spot on Barnes & Noble bookshelves, producing a book tour and an author event later this year.

The media and marketing entrepreneur is known for her Hollywood public relations game with coordinating events for musicians Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Ne-Yo, but she became an author first in 2015 with the self-published My Fabulous & Fearless Journey: From Homeless to Hollywood. She released another self-help book, Fearless Faith + Hustle: 21 Day Devotional Journey, in January. This book, according to Arian Simone’s Instagram, had Barnes & Noble knocking on her door via an email through her website.

In 2016, Barnes & Noble started a self-service program supporting self-published authors with Nook Press that enables them to create hardcover and paperback books for purchase at stores and online. Some authors even qualify to participate at in-store events like book-signings and discussions based on print and e-book sales.

But Arian Simone didn’t go that route, so it’s rare—in comparison to the number of self-published authors with books on the market—to hear of an author being contacted by a major bookseller. She said Barnes & Noble reached out to her after noticing her book sales.

Arian Simone completed her Barnes & Noble book tour in late June with hitting six cities after headlining a public speaking workshop at the Girlboss Rally in Los Angeles. She’s planning an Oct. 19 event for authors in Atlanta under her Fearless brand to showcase their work, which she said will be free to the public.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Wrong End of the Table’ by Ayser Salman

The Wrong End of the Table: A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Woman Just Trying to Fit inThe Wrong End of the Table: A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Woman Just Trying to Fit in by Ayser Salman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“The Wrong End of the Table” by Ayser Salman is a funny outlook on American life via the eyes of an Iraqi Muslim transplant. It’s very light as in mostly the reader gets a view of dating obstacles rather than visits to the mosque, but the humor is well-constructed and the story is relatable.

The author moves to Ohio from Iraq at the age of 3 with eventually relocating to Kentucky then Saudi Arabia then back to Kentucky, where she wrestles with adolescence. Some of the events chosen to be highlighted are intriguing with her stint living in Saudi Arabia and connecting with a friend through the “Xanadu” soundtrack. Or how another friend there worked to escape the restrictive country to her mother who lived in the U.S. The Saudi Arabia chapters stick out since it’s rare to hear what it was like to grow up as a girl there in the 1980s, especially one who had come from America. Another event that stuck out was when the author lived in the college dorm in Kentucky and was accused by her African-American roommate’s cousin of racism over a Prince poster. It shows the growth during that young adult period when clashing with different people from different backgrounds.

Then some of the events were questionable to be plucked out for a memoir like her preschool experience of seeing sexual touching, which didn’t really open to another storyline though emphasized how America would be very different from Iraq. It fit with the theme of the story of not understanding what was going on while trying to be in the know, but it was awkward. At the end, she dives into dating in her 40s, which highlights multiple men who don’t really make an imprint in her life yet they’re mentioned.

Overall, it’s a light and funny memoir. I waited for moments such as her experiences jumping to so many different places and finding a mosque since her Muslim identity is in the title and a part of the book’s marketing, but it’s somewhat missing. The footnotes on almost every page may sound annoying, but they’re hilarious. To sum the memoir up would be it’s a collection of essays of experiences that may not be as life-defining but can induce laughs.

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what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Skin Transparent

Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 -- "TBD" -- Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

The fallout from Nova’s (Rutina Wesley) memoir is still stirring up drama, but in this episode we get more insight on another family secret unbeknownst to most family members.

The episode starts with Nova’s nephew and her sister Charley’s (Dawn-­Lyen Gardner) son Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) going to stay with Nova with plans to attend her upcoming book-signing. Sitting with his mother, Micah wonders how long the silent treatment will stay enforced among the Bordelons.

The family matriarch and aunt Violet (Tina Lifford) can’t sleep, claiming recipes are running through her head, but Hollywood pushes for her to talk about the situation with Jimmy Dale (guest star David Alan Grier), her abusive ex-husband who reappeared after communicating with Nova on her book.

Nova creeps around Violet’s restaurant since she had been banned from being around her aunt, but is turned away by an employee. Nova then calls her brother Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe), who doesn’t pick up. News comes about her getting a six-week book tour due to her glowing The New York Times review. That news, of course, moves her attention away from the family and back on her success.

Charley tries to team up with the other female shareholder to go against the Landrys, the sugar cane empire family that had once owned her ancestors. But the shareholder tells Charley to back off because the Landrys are too powerful. So Charley sashays into a country club to approach a Landry about a highway proposal that would gut Bordelon land. The woman tells Charley that she had read Nova’s book with Charley clapping back on the book with a comparison to “sentimental dribble.”

While Charley recovers from her business-heavy moves, she gets home only to meet her ex-husband’s daughter from an extramarital affair. These affairs are described in Nova’s book with Charley paying off another mistress, so that drama haunts her with the publicity from the book and now a breathing part of evidence from an affair is right in her home.

At the book-signing for Blessing and Blood, Nova reads from a recently added chapter called “Buried Memories” about her father being beaten by three white men at a fishing trip to protect his daughter. She read she would wander the sugarcane fields at night, and on one night, she saw her father bury something into the ground. This is an addition to the book. Her ex-girlfriend comes up to her during the book-signing session and asks about Nova’s family not being there, visible with the empty chairs in the front. She gives Nova a kiss on the lips.

Darla (Bianca Lawson), Ralph Angel’s ex-fiancee and mother of their son Blue (Ethan Hutchison), receives Nova’s book and reads the details of her drug-fueled prostituting nights with baby Blue sitting in the corner. In a flash, she bursts into Nova’s door describing her shock that her past life is in those pages. Nova tries to clean it up; Darla’s name and identifying marks have been changed. This doesn’t sit well with Darla, who keeps telling Nova that she didn’t think of Blue’s feelings since he will eventually read about his mother’s past life.

Charley tells Violet and Ralph Angel at the restaurant that Micah asked about the added chapter in Nova’s book. Violet said she doesn’t know what her brother did that night Nova recalled when she was younger, but he had been worried about Nova getting sexually assaulted by those three white men until that night. Vehemently, Violet defends her brother about him and everyone else having the right to keep a secret between themselves and God.

Darla is hysterically crying on her porch about having to tell Blue the truth while Violet is doing the same in her bathroom with Hollywood hearing the muffled cries as the bathwater runs. As the family falls apart, Nova carries her heavy suitcases out the door for her book tour.

The depth of the secrets are felt in this episode. And Nova switches from concern about the book’s aftermath on her family to excitement when she receives good news from her literary agent and publisher. She still looks bad for unveiling her family’s secrets for money and success, yet she’s torn on what to do about it since her family blocks her apologies. More secrets will be revealed, or at least, there will be more coming out of the secrets we know now.

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what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Where My Body Stops or Begins

Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 -- "TBD" -- Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

The season so far is wrought by the impact of Nova’s (Rutina Wesley) book that the family didn’t see coming.

The episode starts with Micah (Nicholas L. Ashe) returning from vacation with Nova’s book in hand, in which his mother Charley (Dawn-Lyen Gardner) is questioned about why she paid her ex-husband’s mistress millions to keep quiet and working for the sugarcane company ran by descendants of the owners of the Bordelon family’s ancestors. Tough questions indeed.

In the next scene, Nova is asking her agent what to wear for an interview with an audience of psychologists when she gets word of The New York Times review for book that’s called “a love letter” on race, culture, and identity. The critics love the book putting a microscope on the Bordelons.

Nova is soon sitting on a talk show similar to OWN’s Iyanla, Fix My Life with a family asking for guidance on how to mend a sisterly relationship. They want advice on how Nova and Charley became closer. Of course, that relationship is strained over the contents in the book yet the general public doesn’t know it yet…

Meanwhile, Charley is arguing over her shareholder voting status at the company. Again, the company Nova criticized her for being a part of because of their family’s slavery history. And Charley is given the how-you-should-be-grateful-to-be-in-the-room-since-you’re-a-black-woman speech by her colleague about her dividends.

Violet’s shadow-lurking surprise guest, who gave her such a fright that she fainted in her restaurant, appears to be her abusive ex-husband named Jimmy (David Alan Grier). Elsewhere, Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe) tells Darla (Bianca Lawson) that the revelation of him not being Blue’s (Ethan Hutchison) biological father is in Nova’s book. “I didn’t read much after that part. I couldn’t,” he tells her as Darla gets teary about the thought of little Blue discovering the truth.

Jimmy comes back to Violet’s house later and demands to talk to her. He says he wants them to get on the right track, and Violet is hypnotized (in a bad way) by the sight of him. She shrinks, then speaks up. “You’re the last person who can talk about dignity, Jimmy Dale,” she yells. “Get out of my house!”

Nova appears and asks Jimmy why he’s there. Jimmy says it’s nice to see Nova again, which has Violet questioning if they had spoken recently.

“Whatever you did to bring this to my doorstep, it cannot be explained,” Violet tells Nova. Then Nova shoves Jimmy away from Violet until the women are pushing him out the door. But luckily Hollywood, Violet’s new husband, approaches from the driveway and repeatedly punches Jimmy on the lawn.

Nova says she had visited Jimmy for her book to get his point-of-view on his marriage to Violet. “My intention wasn’t to hurt anyone” is her pathetic excuse.

Violet tells Nova that her late parents would be ashamed and told her to leave her home. “I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to talk to you. Not right now, not tomorrow, what I’m feeling in 10 years can’t put enough distance between us… This is the last time I let you in this house, Nova Bordelon.”

Nova leaves the house. But the greed to craft that Ta-Nehisi Coates-like memoir and using her family as a prop to fetch the fame and status as a culturally woke critic is so overpowering in this episode. Nova brought back someone who obviously was abusive to her beloved aunt. Maybe she didn’t think Jimmy would show up at Violet’s door, but the traumatizing fear a woman may have over an abusive partner returning from the grave she mentally placed him in was shown brilliantly in those scenes.

Another matter was how Blue, who’s about 7 years old, will learn maybe before he should about his true paternity that could send him into a tailspin, questioning the only family he’s ever known. While on the other hand, Micah is a teenager, so him finding out about his mother’s actions against his father’s indiscretions sure would leave a bad taste in his mouth but he’s mature enough to understand the product of the NBA world his family had been in for so long.

This season is wonderfully showing how one’s memoir could ignite a fire with the power to destroy a family. When a memoir is written, do we later see the aftermath from others who are in the story? Is there a sufficient post-memoir describing the interactions between friends and family during the memoir’s release? It’s an interesting concept that writers may not take into consideration because they own their stories, but others may feel violated by that ownership.

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what's lit

‘Younger’ TV Review: The Unusual Suspect

"Younger" Ep. 603 (Airs 6/26/19)

The overarching theme of the season is Kelsey (Hilary Duff) taking over the publishing house as a millennial woman and picking up the pieces of the financially strapped company.

The episode starts with Liza (Sutton Foster) and Charles (Peter Hermann) acting in a true crime fantasy at an art museum according to the story on the popular Exonerated podcast.

From last week’s episode, investor Quinn (Laura Benanti) has been experiencing best-seller list bliss for the past three weeks to Kelsey’s dismay after the Lean In-like book, Claw, failed to reach audiences during a pre-sale experiment. Quinn notifies Kelsey about the book trending on Twitter and her plans to be interviewed for The Cut. She then requests Kelsey to interview her.

“How does the book everyone hated made it debut at No. 10 on the best-seller list and continues to rise?” Kelsey poses the question to Liza and Diana (Miriam Shor) after Quinn leaves her office. An smh moment.

They go into a meeting with Audrey Colbert (Willa Fitzgerald), the alleged murderess in the Exonerated podcast. Diana skips the meeting out of fear. “Do you think I did it?” Audrey asks an anxious Kelsey and Liza. She emphasizes she needs a publisher who trusts her and doesn’t think she committed the murders since she’s now an international supervillain. The book can clear her name. After the awkward meeting, Kelsey and Liza learn later that they weren’t the only ones being pitched Audrey’s book, but so was half the major publishers.

Audrey’s agent, the nosy Redmond (Michael Urie), later tells Kelsey that Claw has suspicious sales with bulk purchases and Chinese bots inserting the title all over social media. He lets them know that’s the real gossip on the street.

Kelsey and Liza approach Quinn at the fancy Ardmore Club, disbeliving she’s being blamed for phony sales. When they tell her they have evidence from their peers, Quinn admits she faked the best-selling novel for her senatorial campaign since that shiny New York Times best-selling sticker will be on every cover of her book. Kelsey says this will ruin the business while Quinn argues the book will pump millions into the company. Quinn then threatens Kelsey about showing up at The Cut event for the book.

“No one will work with us if we throw an author under the bus,” Liza says.

When Liza gets home, she finds papers on the dining room table listing prices for the home. She asks Charles why he’s moving money around, and he says he just needs to with his unemployment. Like in the previous two episodes, it seems like Charles and Kelsey’s sometimes beau Zane (Charles Michael Davis) are in cahoots as if they’ll create their own rival publishing house.

At The Cut event, everything seems to be going smoothly until the Q&A part of the fireside chat. One woman tells Kelsey and Quinn about the dagger next to Quinn’s best-selling status, and the dagger means suspicious bulk sales. Quinn laughingly says it’s due to colleges and universities requesting the book to use for syllabi, then she moves the spotlight to Kelsey.

Kelsey maintains her composure. She admits to the bulk sales, but they’re also due to forthcoming events as Quinn plans to throw her hat in the California Senate race. It sparks applause, when Quinn and Kelsey faux hug where Quinn threatens Kelsey about what she’s done since that type of announcement is reserved on a stage of higher magnitude. Kelsey just tells her to enjoy the applause.

The next day, Kelsey, Liza, and Diana learn Mercury nabbed the Audrey Colbert deal. They never heard of this competitor until Redmond lets them know Zane is the publisher of Mercury and the deal stands at $800,000. Their men were in cahoots building their own company! Then the episode ends with Liza’s eyes popping open because she knows Charles had something to do with it. Her boyfriend whom she got hooked onto Exonerated.

Yes, Kelsey’s and Liza’s love lives got more complicated with the clandestine creation of competitor Mercury by their men. An extra episode highlight is Nicole Ari Parker guest starring as a post-childbirth vagina support group leader who Maggie (Debi Mazar) meets after being traumatized by Josh’s (Nico Tortorella) green card wife having a baby in their Uber.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Bluebird, Bluebird’ by Attica Locke

Bluebird, Bluebird (Highway 59, #1)Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Bluebird Bluebird” by Attica Locke is a well-constructed racial murder mystery set in small town Texas that nicely twists and turns with an ending that opens up to a potential sequel.

The story starts with Darren, a rare Black Texas Ranger, defending himself on the stand for his response to an older Black man shooting a known White supremacist in self-defense. While on probation, he learns that a body of a Black man and a young White woman washed ashore two days apart in nearby Lark. He weasels himself into the investigation and learns the male victim had traveled from Chicago to give an ex-musician an old guitar as part of his uncle’s last wishes. Darren feels a close connection to the victim who had graduated from the law school he had once attended but didn’t finish, as his wife brings up a lot. It turns out the ex-musician, Joe Sweet, had been murdered years before in the diner owned by his 70-something wife, Geneva. It’s also the diner the female victim had been a waitress. As Darren puts together the pieces of the two victims and how their lives intertwined one night at the diner with its own controversial history, he tries to deal with what’s left of his career, his marriage, and his desire to solve the crime.

Though not a fan of racial murder mystery, I enjoyed this story because the pacing was even with flawed characters that are still likable. Also an FX drama is in the works, so it’ll be interesting to see how the characters leap off the page onto the screen.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Art of Gathering’ by Priya Parker

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It MattersThe Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all. Your next task is to fuse people, to turn a motley collection of attendees into a tribe. A talented gatherer doesn’t hope for disparate people to become a group. She makes them a group.

“The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker goes into detail about the elements of not just coordinating an event but making sure it’s a purposeful event for attendees. It sounds basic, but with examples from the author’s real-life experiences and public experiences, you realize these elements are not taken into consideration most of the time at the events you attend or plan.

I read this book because I’m active in so many organizations and sometimes want to offer my amateur services of coordinating an event. But I’ve clashed with a women’s group I’m involved in because they didn’t want the sense of sisterhood. With seeing other women’s groups succeed in attendance with members expressing their affection for the events and the groups, I felt sisterhood is a must with a hobby organization that usually meets on the weekend. It’s the solution to luring attendees to an event who would have to navigate Los Angeles traffic to get to an event they had to be at. And I realized you don’t really need guests that would be seen as celebrities; the group can fuse into a tribe and create a purposeful atmosphere.

When reading this book, I thought to myself I’m on the right track, but many others are not. The lack of purpose and connection destroys a lot of events where attendees or members dwindle, which the author emphasizes. She discusses how to open an event, how to close an event, and what to do in the middle. There’s even a section on how an event may be dying and how to resuscitate it during a break. One section sticks out when the author was at a friend’s funeral and the priest started the service with parking logistics amid everyone’s mourning. It showed the importance of the first words to be uttered to set the tone for an event. She also mentioned how she would end dinner parties with thanking everyone for coming as a hint it was time for them to go home. To resolve this, she and her husband would move the party from the dining room when everyone finished eating into the living room as a soft close. This created a break for the attendees who had to leave, though she would emphasize it was a part of the event, and the ones who stayed would talk and drink until everyone left on their own.

The author again expertly weaves so many personal events since she’s a founder of a transformative event planning agency with professional events. She also sprinkles events she read about in the media with picking out the elements in the article that the average reader probably did not notice. This book is a must-read if you’re interested in coordinating events with care or learning how to do so. It will be a useful guide that you’ll return to when planning events with purpose.

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what's lit

Women Authors Donate to Immigration Nonprofit Amid Deportation Reports

Jodi Picoult, Celeste Ng, and Mindy Kaling are some of the famous author voices who’ve donated to Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services amid reports the Trump administration plans massive deportations in two weeks.

Authors For Families seemed to have inspired the matching campaign to benefit the 501(c)(3) nonprofit known by its acronym RAICES, which is the largest immigration legal services provider in Texas. Asking for authors to donate services from query critiques to signed books for its next fundraiser in July, Authors For Families, a group of authors and publishing professionals raising money to reunite immigrant children with their parents, plans to raise money to also benefit National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association or CASA, Women’s Refugee Commission, Kids in Need of Defense or KIND, and The Florence Project.

Jodi Picoult, the best-selling author behind A Spark of Light and My Sister’s Keeper, tweeted she and her supporters raised $50,000 for RAICES.

Celeste, whose two novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere became runaway hits, was one of those supporters.

Circe author Madeline Miller continued matching with her supporters reaching $10,000 with her bump.

Mindy, who celebrated her birthday Monday and recently announced an Amazon Publishing follow-up to Why Not Me? and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), asked what causes she should donate to for her 40th birthday. She first donated $10,000 to RAICES.

Last summer, RAICES raised $25 million after a photo of a 2-year-old girl at the border in a pink jacket crying up at adults went viral.

If you’re an author, do you have a passion you would use your platform for? Or how would you feel as a reader when your top authors stand on a platform you’re not for?

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.

What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.

Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.

This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”

That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.

“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”

At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”

“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”

A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.

“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”

The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.

Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.

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what's lit

‘Little Fires Everywhere’ Rounds Out Casting for Hulu Adaptation

Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon star and produce the Hulu adaptation of "Little Fires Everywhere." Instagram

Celeste Ng’s best-selling novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is gearing up for its TV debut as casting decisions are being finalized.

According to Deadline, the last major character from the book, Bebe Chow, has been casted and will be played by Chinese actress Huang Lu. Joshua Jackson, originally of Dawson’s Creek fame and recently of When They See Us, was also one of the last to round out the cast and will play Bill Richardson, the workaholic attorney patriarch of a family in crisis when the novel opens up to his youngest daughter, Isabella, missing as their home burns. Intricately weaving the tale of the Richardsons with matriarch Elena and the four children and their relationship with their new vagabondish tenants, Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl, the story also evolves into a custody fight between another two mothers that has divided Elena and Mia along with the 1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio community.

Before the novel was released in 2017, Reese Witherspoon bought the rights, which she had first done with Gone Girl. It has become her specialty: to buy the rights for television and film purposes before the book hits shelves. This time it will be with her Hello Sunshine brand, most known for its monthly book club. Currently starring in the second season of HBO’s Big Little Lies, which already reached the deadly ending of Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name, Reese is working on the Little Fires Everywhere project with Scandal star Kerry Washington.

This will be Kerry’s first major project with her production company, Simpson Street. It was behind her most recent Broadway play, American Son, which is the debut of playwright Christopher Demos-Brown and directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.

Celeste, Reese, and Kerry will be executive producers for the eight-episode limited series. According to IMDB and Deadline, the casting for the major characters are complete.

Elena Richardson will be played by Reese Witherspoon.

Mia Warren will be played by Kerry Washington.

Pearl Warren will be played by Lexi Underwood.

Bill Richardson will be played by Joshua Jackson.

Izzy Richardson will be played by Megan Stott.

Lexie Richardson will be played by Jade Pettyjohn.

Trip Richardson will be played by Jordan Elsass.

Moody Richardson will be played by Gavin Lewis.

Bebe Chow will be played by Huang Lu.

Linda McCullough will be played by Rosemarie DeWitt.

Restaurant manager (where Mia and Bebe work) will be played by Paul Yen.

Little Fires Everywhere landed at Hulu following a multiple-outlet bidding war and will also be under the umbrella of ABC Signature Studios along with Hello Sunshine and Simpson Street. Liz Tigelaar (Casual, Life Unexpected), Lauren Neustadter, Pilar Savone and Lynn Sheldon will all executive produce. Award-winning mystery novelist Attica Locke is also one of the writers, as seen in the show’s Instagram account, fresh from working on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us.

“At Hello Sunshine, we strive to shine a light on female-driven stories that are rooted in inspiration, emotion and truth – all of which form the bedrock of Celeste Ng’s ingenious work,” Reese said in the March 2018 Hulu press release first announcing the project. “Hulu has a rich history of transforming groundbreaking literature into groundbreaking television, and we are confident that their talented team will use this story to spur a long-overdue dialogue around race, class, and what it means to be a mother. With Kerry Washington, Liz Tigelaar and now Hulu, Hello Sunshine has brought together a dream lineup of creative collaborators, and we are privileged and humbled to have the opportunity to work with them to bring this important project to life.”

“As producers, we at Simpson Street are so proud to be part of this team to tell this extraordinary story inspired by Celeste Ng’s phenomenal novel and we are thrilled to be embarking on this journey with Hulu,” Kerry said in a press release. “As an actress, I am floored to have the opportunity to work alongside Reese Witherspoon exploring the rich themes of this story playing these dynamic characters.”

Categories
what's lit

‘Younger’ TV Review: Flush with Love

"Younger" Ep. 602 (Airs 6/19/19)

How much should an investor on a publisher’s board get involved in the business when she wants her book to be published? That’s the question highlighting the season’s second episode.

Quinn (guest star Laura Benanti), the chief financial officer-type from last week’s episode, turns out to be an investor on the board. She wants her book to be the first release of the revamped publisher. In the beginning of the episode, Diana (Miriam Shor) asks why is the company now looking at focus groups for their books. It turns out Kelsey (Hilary Duff) wants to ensure the success of her first book release as CEO.

The focus group loathes the book with a passion. One woman asks why is the author being given a voice while another is crying about how she wants to un-read it. Liza (Sutton Foster) says her edits weren’t taken seriously therefore didn’t happen, so the book may stay rough and unlikable.

At lunch, Kelsey and Liza invite Quinn to a fancy restaurant where Quinn gifts them with gold-plated business card holders. Then Kelsey suggests holding Quinn’s self-help empowerment book Claw for the spring since it needs more edits when at the moment it’s coming off as “anti-woman.”

Quinn brushes it off and emphasizes how her vote brought Kelsey to her CEO role.

“If a writer doesn’t want to take notes, they might as well self-publish,” Liza hints aloud.

Yet Quinn, determined, remains steadfast that her book is fine. She then starts slamming the table with a cheer: “Guess who wrote a masterpiece? It will be our first release!” The rumble gets louder with diners looking their way at the commotion. Kelsey is confused while Quinn says the cheer rhythm is from her 1998 cheer competition, which Liza brings up the incessant mentions of high school in the book. Quinn keeps going with the cheer until Kelsey and Liza join her to stop it. After lunch, Kelsey asks what happened. Liza interjects it from Chapter 3 of Claw called “Charm and Disarm.”

Now working to save the company from not publishing Quinn’s book first during her new stint as CEO, Kelsey has been in talks with Reese Witherspoon about a screenplay she calls “sexy, millennial and set in the fashion world.” The screenwriter can produce a novel in a month after submitting a test chapter. Liza is uncertain about the quick change of events, but Kelsey is convinced that the simple mention of Reese Witherspoon will force Quinn out of the way.

Later on, Liza drops that she told her current boo/former publisher Charles about the work drama with Quinn. Kelsey doesn’t like the sound of this. She takes it as her actions being scrutinized for her not being prepared to be a CEO since she’s 28. She tells Liza to schedule a dinner with her and Quinn alone.

At the dinner, Quinn reveals she can’t have her book pushed to the spring because she plans to jump-start her senatorial campaign in California. Her book will help her become the “strong, independent voice.” But Kelsey resists.

“Every book that comes out of Millennial has to be the best it can be,” Kelsey pushes. Then she adds, “Board members don’t tell publishers what to do.”

Quinn dares Kelsey to publish Claw or she’ll never hear from her again. Kelsey puts a ballpoint pen in front of Quinn because she wants that in writing.

Other storylines include Josh (Nico Tortorella) becoming a father after a balloon mishap at the gender reveal party and Diana writing a magazine article about how much she loves her plumber boyfriend who usually gets the independent woman burn from her.

The last season, similar to the turn of events in last week’s premiere, show the series emphasizing the book pitches coming to the the publishing house will somehow relate to businesswomen empowerment with Kelsey as a millennial CEO. The series, again with its title, surrounds Liza lying about her age to compete in the publishing industry but also shows how younger people like Kelsey and her competitive boo Zane (Charles Michael Davis) are taking the helm with their pure diligence and ambition. Zane and Charles also seem to be secretly building their own publishing company, so hopefully that storyline turns out to be true in a future episode and cause even more havoc in their career goals and romantic lives.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Poet X’ by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Poet XThe Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The Poet X” by Elizabeth Acevedo is a coming-of-age novel that expertly showcases the teenage life of a girl of color who’s first-generation American scared to share her true voice due to family expectations.

Xiomara is a Dominican teenager living in New York City with the gift of poetry she feels she can’t share with the world because she has to please her strict parents. Her religious mother makes Xiomara and her twin brother Xavier aka Twin attend after-school bible lessons. Xiomara is rough around the edges while Twin is active in his religious lessons and goes to a high-performing school, so Xiomara suppresses her love for poetry, especially since Poetry Club coincides with her religious classes. Her young teacher, Ms. Galliano, inspires her to find her voice, and when she does, Xiomara is falling in love with her classmate Aman, which is another no-no under her religious household. When Xiomara begins skipping church for poetry, her world begins to crumble as she realizes she can’t be the pure Catholic Dominican girl her parents want her to be.

This is a great YA novel with the necessary elements describing the hardships of an adolescent girl of color struggling with being American and also having immigrant parents going by the stricter rules of their homeland. I read it on audio book, so the characters’ names may not be spelled correctly, but the author does a fabulous job in her poetic prose-y voice, so definitely recommend the audio book.

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film reviews

Netflix Options Sarah Dessen Novels for Films

Pioneering young adult novelist Sarah Dessen will see three of her novels become films on Netflix as the streaming service announces the upcoming projects.

Sarah, who released her latest novel The Rest of the Story earlier this month, will turn the following books into cinematic pieces: Along for the Ride from 2009, which will be the first to see its onscreen adaption; This Lullaby from 2002; and Once and For All from 2017. Netflix provided summaries of each book below.

Along for the Ride

 

It’s been so long since Auden slept at night. Ever since her parents’ divorce—or since the fighting started. Now she has the chance to spend a carefree summer with her dad and his new family in the charming beach town where they live. A job in a clothing boutique introduces Auden to the world of girls: their talk, their friendship, their crushes. She missed out on all that, too busy being the perfect daughter to her demanding mother. Then she meets Eli, an intriguing loner and a fellow insomniac who becomes her guide to the nocturnal world of the town. In her signature pitch-perfect style, Sarah Dessen explores the hearts of two lonely people learning to connect.

This Lullaby

A New York Times bestseller. She’s got it all figured out. Or does she? When it comes to relationships, Remy’s got a whole set of rules. Never get too serious. Never let him break your heart. And never, ever date a musician. But then Remy meets Dexter, and the rules don’t seem to apply anymore. Could it be that she’s starting to understand what all those love songs are about?

Once and For All

After years facing brides with cold feet and badly behaved wedding guests, wedding planner Louna has become skeptical about romance and plans on remaining single during her last summer before college. Luckily, the busy wedding schedule provides plenty of legitimate excuses for Louna to avoid opportunities to meet potential dates. That changes when satisfying a particularly fussy bridal party requires hiring the bride’s brother, Ambrose.

No dates have been announced for the projects yet.

Sarah’s current novel The Rest of the Story centers on “big-hearted Emma Saylor, who reconnects with a part of her family she hasn’t seen since she was a little girl—and falls in love, all over the course of a magical summer.” Sounds like the perfect summer young adult read. Sarah’s first novel That Summer came out in 1996, making her one of the veteran young adult novelists still producing work today. (Author note: My favorite novels I read in high school by Sarah was Dreamland and This Lullaby mentioned above). According to her website, the New York Times best-selling novelist’s 14 books have been published in over 30 countries and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Her literary accolades include the 2017 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for outstanding contribution to young adult literature.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Piecing Me Together’ by Renee Watson

Piecing Me TogetherPiecing Me Together by Renée Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Piecing Me Together” by Renee Watson is a relatable story of a Black teen girl so focused on what she wants but doesn’t realize what she has can still get her to where she wants to be.

Jade is a high school junior/multimedia artist who attends a private school in Portland, nowhere near her impoverished neighborhood, so she makes a few bus transfers each way to get the best education. But she doesn’t have any friends at her school until she meets Sam, a white girl, who lives in a neighborhood near her. Now Jade’s mom can get off her back about making friends since she still is close with her childhood friend, Lee Lee, who attends the neighborhood school. Regardless of her socioeconomic status, Jade, gifted in Spanish, wants to go on a field trip to Costa Rica. But students have to be nominated, so when she gets called into the counselor’s office she thinks she’s got a nomination but instead she’s got into a mentoring program for Black teen girls. Jade is not entirely sold on the opportunity but attends the program’s first meeting, only to be stood up by her mentor, Maxine. It turns out Maxine, a Black 20-something professional who graduated from the school, can barely commit to the program with boyfriend drama. Jade picks up on this and takes their relationship with a grain of salt until they become closer the more they spend time together. As she visits museums in Portland, Jade is looking forward to hearing back on the Costa Rica opportunity, but she learns some opportunities won’t be given to her because of who she is but other opportunities will come her way because of that.

This story is a good read with smoothly showing Jade gain her voice when she feels it doesn’t matter because she’s Black, poor, and obese. She sees how not speaking up affects her relationships with one example of Jade and Sam having a temporary falling-out because Jade feels she’s not being heard when she isn’t saying exactly how she feels. It also shows the trauma of a Black girl being in a predominantly white school and how she becomes invisible despite her hard work. Jade sees there are other ways she can succeed, and once she sees that, the law of attraction will lead her to what she really wants.

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what's lit

‘Younger’ TV Review: Big Day

"Younger" Ep. 601 (Airs 6/12/19)

The sixth and final season of Younger started with Millennial Imprint boss Kelsey taking the helm as the youngest publisher in New York City from longtime editor Charles, who gave his career up for his perpetually age-lying girlfriend Liza. The episode returns to Kelsey taking over as CEO and how her struggle may be reflected in the books the company will publish.

Younger centers around 42-year-old Liza (Sutton Foster) lying about her age with subtracting almost 25 years off to make it in the publishing world when she had taken time off to raise her now-college-aged daughter. She works with Kelsey (Hilary Duff), an actual 28-year-old taking the publishing world by storm, especially in this season with taking over their storied publishing house.

After Liza gets emotional seeing a facility worker unscrewing Charles’ (Peter Hermann) name plaque from his office and placing one with Kelsey’s name, she and Kelsey learn from their chief financial officer that Page Six plans to expose why Charles abandoned the company. It says he left for a 28-year-old whom he was having an affair with (he’s in his 40s with an estranged wife), which they all knew could be interpreted as Kelsey, diminishing her meteoric rise to CEO. Liza yells to the entire office that she’s the one Charles is dating. This rubs her former boss Diana (Miriam Shor) the wrong way, as she doesn’t know Liza’s secret of her real age and sees her as an opportunity-stealing millennial. And with Kelsey now being the boss also doesn’t sit well with Diana.

Later in the day, Kelsey learns the company’s finances are in trouble with revenue slipping away every day. After that meeting, she meets with a potential author, surprisingly a black woman since the diversity in the cast reflects the real publishing industry, who pitches her book, The Glass Cliff. It focuses on boss women and how they’re set up not to win. She gives the example of women usually inheriting the CEO role of distressed companies. Kelsey gulps at the mention of this, knowing she’s living that life.

Other plots pop up in the episode with Diana threatening to quit but being lured out of the decision with a Dolly Parton 9 to 5 karaoke stint, Charles buying a bed for Liza and him now that they’re more official, and Josh (Nico Tortorella) finding out he’s going to be a father to the Irish woman he had green card marriage with. But the overarching theme focused on Kelsey and how rising to the top is not what it’s cracked up to be. This will even extend in their book decisions like with The Glass Cliff and next week’s episode preview showing Kelsey trying to explain to her CFO that her book pitch sucks.

Like other shows, Younger produced a novel, Marriage Vacation, and the book review is available.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘With the Fire on High’ by Elizabeth Acevedo

With the Fire on HighWith the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“With the Fire on High” by Elizabeth Acevedo touches on the struggle girls of color have when opportunities come their way because they live in a place where such opportunities never come or they feel they can’t handle those opportunities due to where they live and how they live.

Emoni Santiago is a 17-year-old high school senior with a passion to cook. She’s always cooking at home for ‘Buela and Emma aka Babygirl, the daughter she had at 14. A culinary experience class opens at her charter school and she gets a spot, but she realizes her usual rule-breaking in the kitchen at home won’t cut it in class. She tries to ignore the hiccups and wallows in the successes of the class since they have the opportunity to go to Spain at the end of the semester. It takes a fancy dinner at a restaurant to convince Emoni to take the class more seriously since it can lead her to a culinary career. Once she refocuses, she becomes the head of the donation drive for the Spain trip. And she also finds herself somewhat falling for Malachi – they like each other but Emoni wants to put Babygirl and school first, especially when she senses something off with ‘Buela, deals with a father going in and out of her life by flying to Puerto Rico, hands off Babygirl to her father Tyrone and his family, and sustains a relationship with her deceased mother’s sister.

As a teen mom, Emoni feels guilty about opportunities that would take her away from Babygirl because she knows not only she but also her family had to make sacrifices for her daughter because of her unplanned pregnancy. She wants to stay home and cook dishes her way because that keeps her close to ‘Buela and Babygirl, which almost derails her from continuing with the prized culinary class and going to Spain. There are chapters focusing on her time in Spain and she brings up the disbelief a girl from North Philly ended up in Seville. It also helps her find a way to attend college and stay close to home for her family. But the worrying about how the opportunities could mess up her current life when her current life may not be ideal but comfortable sticks with her as she tries to decide what’s next.

The theme of motherhood resonates in the novel with Emoni taking care of Babygirl while also wondering what her mother would’ve been like. Her mother died during childbirth and her father, Julio, gave her to his mother ‘Buela to raise. So while Emoni is working hard to be the best mother she can be on top of high school and college preparation, she questions why Julio is not around when he’s alive. And ‘Buela starts to be secretive over the stress of raising Julio then having to raise Emoni then helping raise Babygirl. Her mothering becomes endless in a way, and Emoni wishes she could change things to make it easier for her grandmother.

Overall, the book has remnants of an Americanized modern-day version of the classic “Like Water for Chocolate” with each part opening up to a recipe Emoni wants to conquer. Throughout the book, her cooking is heightened with ingredients she chooses for home and school to make her food pop. Then her family and class experience deeply-rooted emotions when she cooks and those emotions are even seen with the restaurateurs in Spain. Food is magic. Every other chapter being dedicated to what we already know about her past is annoying; it was already weaved into the story and additional details could’ve been weaved. The story stalled with those chapters and elongated it for no reason, but maybe for other readers that technique works. It’s a new perspective on YA lit with the teen mom lifestyle and school being a big part of the story like the author’s first novel, “Poet X.” The theme of a girl of color trying to figure out her dreams is still present in this novel and is elevated with the new perspective of culinary dreams.

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what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ TV Review: Pleasure is Black

For Show Promotion Only
Queen Sugar -- Ep 401 Photo Credit: Skip Bolen / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

Queen Sugar returned for its fourth season with Nova Bordelon (Rutina Wesley), the activist journalist of the sugarcane business family, preparing for the launch of her book and realizing her family might not be ready for it.

In the beginning of the episode, Nova is creating a video about Blessing and Blood, looking confident while vaguely describing her “American family.” But minutes later, she’s at a restaurant chugging wine and telling her agent that she’s nervous about the impact of her memoir because she failed to prepare her family for its contents, even though she’s learned the New York Times plans to review the book.

“They know it’s coming, but they don’t know what’s in it,” Nova says.

Back in Louisiana, in their summer attire with umbrellas, the family parades up to aunt Violet (Tina Lifford)‘s new restaurant, Vi’s Prized Pies & Diner, where Nova’s antisocial demeanor stands out.

“This is the last we’ll see her serve anybody,” a woman tells Prosper (Henry G. Sanders), who works with the sugarcane business, as they chat with Nova serving behind the counter. She goes on to add her sister saw a billboard in New York City advertising Nova’s book that’s being compared to the works of Roxane Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates. “What’s the book about? Can we get a little preview? Or a taste?”

Violet’s new husband, Hollywood (Omar J. Dorsey), overhears the conversation. As Nova turns to the kitchen, Hollywood whispers his thoughts on the book to her.

“When do we get to read your book?” Hollywood asks. “You ain’t been shy about nothing you did. Something not right about that book.”

Nova hesitates.

Hollywood adds the family should’ve been prepared for what the memoir would entail because he has a feeling that family secrets have been spilled without permission.

Outside in the dining area, Violet expresses her dislike for her nephew Ralph Angel (Kofi Siriboe) passing his son Blue like “day-old bread” in his custody exchange between his ex Darla (Bianca Lawson), who recently revealed he’s not Blue’s father. 1990s teen R&B sensation Tevin Campbell made his high-profile appearance singing at the festive opening as a Bordelon cousin.

Guiltily, Nova ambushes Charley (Dawn-­Lyen Gardner) at work the next day while her sister, dressed impeccably in a taupe pantsuit ready to head to women’s conference panel, is confused by the surprise. Nova hands her sister a copy of the manuscript and later visits her brother Ralph Angel to leave a copy as she wipes a tear away.

At the conference, Charley is getting revved up during her inspirational speech while receiving a leadership award until a reporter bombards her with questions in the crowd. The reporter claims she received an advanced copy of Nova’s manuscript and it read Charley had secretly paid off one of her basketball player ex-husband’s mistresses, which happened two seasons ago. Once Charley gets home, she pops the cork on a bottle of wine and chugs as much as she can before laying her eyes on the manuscript.

In the morning, she calls Ralph Angel to warn him to not look at the manuscript until she talks to him. On the car ride to talk to her brother, Charley calls her lawyer to send her sister a cease-and-desist over the book.

Meanwhile, Hollywood picks up the manuscript on Violet’s desk and reads the first page to see it disparages Violet calling her a self-proclaimed “strong black woman” but saying how she lived her life doesn’t show that evidence.

Elsewhere, Ralph Angel, intrigued by Charley’s warning to not look at the manuscript, decides to look at the manuscript. He reads the paragraph about how he has a “fragile ego” as it criticizes his drama with Darla for never questioning Blue’s paternity when she is a recovering drug addict.

Nova visits her father’s mausoleum at the cemetery, laying a fresh bouquet of flowers.

“I’m afraid, Daddy, that everybody will not understand what I’m doing, but I’m offering up my work to see that, to be better,” she cries on the ground. “Because I grew up with too many secrets. You did, too. And it’s time for us to be as free as you wanted us to be. Please give me the strength to see this through.”

The episode ends with a telling preview for the rest of the season with the memoir tearing the family apart while the audience waits to see what these secrets are. It’s interesting to see a TV series based on a book have a storyline where a personal story could be destructive to a family. The impact of memoirs doesn’t seem to be brought up in the book world as authors most likely don’t touch on the subject with their families or generally say their families are supportive. Queen Sugar, with the vision brought to the forefront by main producers Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, will be a standout this season on examining the impact of a published book on a family.

“This is the last time I want to look at you,” Violet says to Nova in the preview.

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what's lit

Celeb Bookwomen Announce Their June Book Club Picks

Reese Witherspoon / Hello Sunshine

Here’s a quick roundup of the celebrity-helmed book clubs and their June books:

Actress and producer Reese Witherspoon chooses The Cactus by Sarah Haywood for Hello Sunshine.

“Susan, our main character, navigates a love triangle, family drama, and being pregnant for the first time at 45. Hope y’all love Susan as much as I do!,” Reese said in the announcement.

 

Sarah also wrote an exclusive essay for Hello Sunshine about the themes resonating through her novel.

 

NBC correspondent and former first daughter Jenna Bush Hager chooses Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok for Today Show Book Club.

“It’s a mystery,” Jenna said in the announcement. “Sylvie Lee is the main character and she’s a golden child. She disappears. The story unfolds as her family copes and discovers all the secrets surrounding her life.” She added the team unveiled the book club pick later than usual because the book was released on June 4.

Belletrist, the book blog administered by actress Emma Roberts and producer Karah Preiss, also chose Searching for Sylvie Lee for June with its branded digestible interview with the author.

Actress Emma Roberts’ Our Shared Shelf on Goodreads is still reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a book the bimonthly book club chose in May. The book also is a National Book Award Finalist and now available in paperback.

“Min Jin Lee is unabashedly a feminist and her resilient female characters propel this riveting story,” the book club wrote in its announcement. “Lee has written a moving, historical saga that is also a timeless masterpiece; almost 500 pages long, and we didn’t want it to end. This brilliant, eye-opening novel is about outsiders, minorities, the disenfranchised and yet somehow embraces us all.”

Indie rock pop band Florence + The Machine is reading three books for its Between Two Books club: Read and Riot by artist, activist, and Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova; My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet; and The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward.

 

“The title of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s book, ‘The Terrible,’ can mean different things to each reader. It can be a feeling you can’t quite word. It can describe depression. It can refer to the things you fear,” the book club tweeted June 6.

 

Side note: Florence + The Machine’s 2011 album Ceremonials is a wonderfully lyrical and musical album for a writing session.
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experiences

Busy Philipps Says Memoir Prepared Her for Sharing Abortion Story

Author-actress Busy Philipps and author-CEO Jaclyn Johnson hold a fireside chat at Aerie REALtreat at Rolling Greens Nursery in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2019 / she lit

Actress-author Busy Philipps shared how her 2018 published memoir inspired her to share a personal story on TV at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday afternoon.

Arriving from an earlier event with BookSparks in conversation with Taylor Jenkins Reid and Abdi Nazemian in Hollywood, the This Will Only Hurt a Little memoirist spoke to about 150 attendees at a fireside chat at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District with Work Party author and Create & Cultivate CEO Jaclyn Johnson about how her recently canceled late night talk show was another vehicle to share her abortion story. Though she told the story in her book, Busy said she hadn’t shared it publicly until last month in response to the Georgia abortion bill.

“It’s all crazy, but writing about it in my book prepared me for when the extreme abortion bans happened,” she said. “First of all, the Georgia ban was passed the Monday after I had found out that my show was canceled. We didn’t tell people for five weeks, so I knew my show was canceled, and that’s when the Georgia ban was passed through their Senate, but the governor hadn’t signed it in yet.

“So my initial feeling was that I wanted to do it that day. However, my husband and I talked about it, and he said, ‘I don’t want E! to think you’re going on television to talk about your abortion in some way because they canceled your show’… I just didn’t want any of the message to be convoluted.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, also known as the “heartbeat bill” on May 7. That same day, Busy aired her story on Busy Tonight, in which she said she didn’t let the network know about her decision to share her story because she felt it would lessen the potency or stop the story from being told. She said the show submitted a full script, which she wrote, while she personally placed it in the teleprompter, so the weight of the impact would be all on her. Her last show aired May 16.

Last Tuesday, she was a guest speaker at the “Threats to Reproductive Rights in America” House Judiciary Committee hearing.

“The timing of things with being able to go testify at the House Judiciary Committee; I wouldn’t have been able to do if my show on E! that 40 people watched was still on,” Busy quipped.

Busy is an #AerieREAL role model. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters. In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success.

Regardless of getting an abortion at 15 years old, Busy said she’s felt the emotional toll on making the decision.

“It’s something I had never spoken about publicly, but I held a great deal of shame about for many many years,” she said. “When I wrote my memoir, I knew I wanted to talk about it. But I knew that it would be difficult for my family. I felt very strongly in sharing the whole story.”

She said her talk show was a creative vehicle for storytelling expression and hopes it can be revived via another outlet.

“It speaks to the other thing which was why I wanted even to do a late night talk show in the first place,” she said. “We know that diversity and representation in the media of all kinds makes a difference in our media and having a female voice in late night television is important, especially when our country is dealing with lots of different issues that affect women.”

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experiences

Poet Cleo Wade Talks Setting Intentions at Aerie REALtreat Event

Aspiring author-model Iskra, author-gymnast Aly Raisman, and author-poet Cleo Wade hold a panel at Aerie REALtreat in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2019 / she lit

Best-selling poet Cleo Wade emphasized the power of setting intentions and navigating one’s way to success in today’s world at the Aerie REALtreat conference in downtown Los Angeles Saturday morning.

The Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life author is also an #AerieREAL role model as she pumped up the audience at Rolling Greens Nursery in the Arts District then joined a panel with fellow ambassadors Olympic gymnast and Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything author Aly Raisman and body-positive model Iskra. Aerie is the intimate apparel lifestyle offshoot of American Eagle Outfitters.

Using advice from her book, Cleo said one of her intentions is to exude kindness when she’s most stressed.

“Another one I have is: Can I be patient? Can I not make rushing everyone else’s problem?” she said. “I’m sure you’re all familiar when you’re the one running late, but then all of sudden it’s the Uber driver’s problem if they’re not going fast enough. And then you’re like, ‘I have to be there in 10 minutes,’ if like you needing to be there in 10 minutes has to do with whether or not it’s 20 minutes away or not, and that is somehow their fault.”

Several of the estimated 100 women in attendance in Cleo’s speaking session went up to the decorated stage to share their intentions. Cleo said she requested Aerie put notebooks and pens in the giveaway bags to do the five-minute, intention-writing exercise.

“For me, intentions are a space where we can say I know I have these default settings as the person I am, but what does it look like for me to carve out the person I know I can be,” Cleo said. “That’s what we really do when we set intentions for ourselves.”

In partnership with Create & Cultivate (disclosure: I’m an insider), the event focused on tapping into women’s power for entrepreneurial success, so Cleo brought up the theme of making connections.

“If you’re someone who doesn’t like to be the first to walk up to someone to say like, ‘Your hair looks really amazing today’ or ‘I love your scarf,’ or ‘Hi, my name is Cleo,’ then maybe your intention for today is ‘I’m going to be the first to say hello,'” she said. “If you came here today, like so many of you I’m sure did, it’s such a beautiful and safe space to create fellowship and participate in sisterhood and make new friends then maybe your intention today is, ‘I am going to be open enough to allow connection to take place between me and another sister I walk or sit next to today.'”

She then had the attendees hug the woman sitting next to them with an introduction. The session ended with her reading a poem from her book while sitting on the edge of the stage.

Joining Aly and Iskra in the next panel, Cleo discussed how many use the internet to connect and grow a brand but recommended to be cautious of what works or won’t work for you.

“Before you endorse anything, there are people who are working with you, for you, not for how many people follow you or how many people’s eyeballs are on what you see or do,” she said. “And you do that by getting to know brands or people before you work with them, so that they are there for your voice, they are there for your story, they are there for the way that you have built your community rather than anyone reducing you to a number or anyone reducing you to an algorithm.”

And with so many connections, the act of gluing the connections can become stressful to the point where slowing down may be the best option.

“I think in that space it’s always OK if you allow yourself to not be Superwoman. I always say with the women who work with me, it’s like I don’t want to be Superwoman because she’s not real,” Cleo said. “That has to be OK because that’s the truth. So when it comes to whether having the answer or that one piece of advice—if I don’t have that, I don’t put pressure on myself to have that.”

Aly later said as the main takeaway she wanted to share with audience was partly inspired by Cleo’s book, and that’s to be “authentically you.”

“Know your value and what you want in your life,” she said. “If you are willing to, I would recommend when you leave here, or when you feel like it, to really take time and really get to know what you want and who you want to be with… I think it’s about really knowing your value and really getting to know what makes you happy.”

Cleo co-signed actively surrounding ourselves with people who support us with recalling a moment she shared with her brother in their mother’s kitchen one day in Louisiana. After realizing it would’ve been a good anecdote in her book, she said her mother was cooking food in a pan when she and her brother mentioned “haters.”

“She looks up from the pan and says, ‘Haters? What are haters? I have no idea who hates me. I don’t hang out with those people.’ I always think of that as some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten because you’re like, ‘Exactly!'” Cleo said. “Sometimes, I don’t think we realize we’re moving in this world looking for people to criticize us because we don’t believe in our own power and we don’t believe in our own place in the world. We actually look around whether it’s on the internet or in social spaces for people who might reject us or tell us we’re not enough.”

The panel ended with Aly having the audience engage in a 10-minute meditation rather than the originally scheduled fitness workout.