Thicker than Water by Kerry Washington reflects on the award-winning actress’ life from her humble beginnings in the Bronx to her stardom in Hollywood as she begins to seek the truth in a long-held family secret.
Even as a young child, I felt that I was never who my dad needed me to be. I knew he really wanted a son and that they weren’t having any more children. I wondered if I could soften the blow somehow by being a daughter who was prettier, or smarter, or braver, or more successful, but even that didn’t work.
Kerry Marisa Washington was born in New York City, and her story focuses on the meaning of her middle name. Marisa translates to “girl of the sea” in Latin. She embodies her mermaid nature by swimming as a child with her cousins and neighbors at a government-subsidized cooperative housing building for middle-income families. When she swims, that is the time she feels the most free. She tries to hold onto that childhood freedom when she overhears her parents fighting at night. The tension between her parents over legal turmoil circulating her father’s real estate dealings makes her anxious. As she evolves from child to teenager, she absorbs her family’s troubles as the only child. The child her parents desired for so long after years of infertility. The child who lives in the shadow of a stillborn sibling who came years before her when her mother was married to another man. The child who is slowly growing older and finding her purpose.
What soothes the blossoming anxiety is acting. Kerry becomes a standout in middle and high school performances. Her mother worries about the lack of stability in a potential acting career. The only famous person they know is Jennifer Lopez, who taught Kerry dance at their local Boys & Girls Club, but according to Kerry, everyone noticed J.Lo’s charisma. To Kerry, she may not be cut from the same cloth. As a teen accumulating roles in school performances, she joins Mount Sinai Hospital’s Adolescent Health Center’s S.T.A.R. program, which educates and entertains children about the dangers of risky sexual behavior. She gets recognition when she plays the role of a girl who discovered she had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS during a televised ABC town hall. She also nabs her Screen Actors Guild membership off a speaking role in an ABC after-school special. These could be viewed as moments of unintentional manifestation when she later becomes the first Black actress to lead a primetime TV drama in nearly 40 years on the same network in her role as Olivia Pope on Scandal.
Her love for acting is noticed by a mentor, who refers her to an agent for an audition for Interview with the Vampire. She loses the role to Thandiwe Newton. As a Black teen girl in high school, Kerry isn’t winning roles, but when Thandiwe Newton also nabs the role of Sally Hemings in another audition, Kerry heads to George Washington University in D.C. The university is not too far away from New York City, but Kerry’s growing anxiety evolves into an eating disorder.
She struggles with her binge eating for years, but upon graduation, she heads back home in hopes of nabbing roles with her college training. She gets her first big role in an independent film called Our Song about three Black young women in a marching band. She soon gets the pivotal role as Chenille, a teen mother balancing school in inner-city Chicago, in Save the Last Dance.
My biology had been their enemy. Consequently, I had learned to survive without a true relationship to it. I didn’t know my body; I couldn’t read its signs. I didn’t rest when I was tired, didn’t register when I was hungry, couldn’t decipher when I was full. Over time, my body became my enemy, and I couldn’t bear the discomfort of being fully present in my skin. I sensed that my embodiment scared my mother and threatened my dad. Presence itself—being fully alive and aware—became something to avoid. The fuel that had powered our family was pretending.
Over the last several years solidifying her TV and film success, the private star marries her husband Nnamdi Asomugha and raises two children while being a bonus mother to a stepdaughter. Scandal is coming to an end, and Kerry is exploring options with her production company, Simpson Street. Upon meeting Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. at an event, the renowned historian invites Kerry to be featured on his show, Finding Your Roots on PBS. But then her parents give her devastating news about her lineage, which forces her to question her identity and her past.
On the heels of Americans seeking discoveries within their DNA, the actress learns that her willingness to please her parents and feeling down when she thought she wasn’t the perfect child fueled so much of her anxiety. While handling these emotional fluctuations, she also chose a career filled with rejections that kept watering the seed in her mind that she wasn’t good enough. In her role as Olivia Pope, we see Kerry Washington portray this complicated woman with such poise that we may not realize how much energy goes into showing that poise to an audience. By telling her story, she seems more down-to-earth, despite her opportunities of acting arising so early in her life.
The memoir follows Kerry as she goes through the ups and downs of acting, a career she felt connected to as a preteen. Witnessing her work ethic while witnessing the countless rejections can be seen as inspirational for readers who are also in ambitious careers. Her first film did turn out to be an indie film darling and opened the door to her role in Save the Last Dance, but she had already been acting for more than a decade.
Overall, the memoirist does a wonderful job of connecting the trials and tribulations to finding solace in memories tied to buoyancy and freedom, especially with being one with the water. The liquid made up of hydrogen and oxygen makes one feel weightless, so when situations weighed on her, she thought about the feeling in the water. The thought of water didn’t fix everything, but realizing she had felt the feeling of freedom at one point helped her navigate the hardships. This book works well for readers and Scandal fans who are interested in inner child and teen healing, body positivity, career exploration, and genealogical discovery.
⚠️ Trigger warning! The story and the post below have graphic references to topics such as sexual assault.
Black Cake on Hulu brings Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel to life through a cinematographic lens, showing the main character’s inner conflicts of hiding her identity multiple times to escape an arranged marriage that ends in murder.
The TV series opens with Covey escaping the murder scene in her wedding dress toward the ocean in 1960s Jamaica then shows 70-something Eleanor walking into the ocean with her surfboard, determined to get lost in the water. The girl and the woman are the same person. How Coventina “Covey” Lyncook, played magnificently by Mia Isaac in her youthful years, becomes Eleanor Bennett, played by Chipo Chung in her older years, makes the story within Black Cake full-bodied like the rich dessert that serves as its title.
For the quick synopsis (the book review can be found here), Covey is growing up in Jamaica as a competitive swimmer and the only daughter of Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, one of the only Chinese immigrants in the Black community. Her mother, Mathilda, left years earlier, so her mother’s friend and housekeeper, Pearl, helps raise her while earning money baking black cakes for weddings. When Lin runs into gambling issues that threaten his general store, he arranges for Covey to marry Little Man, a career criminal. Seventeen years old, Covey wants to keep swimming with her best friend, Bunny. She is also in love with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, a fellow competitive swimmer. When Little Man falls to his death during the reception right when Pearl’s black cake is being served, Covey makes a run toward the ocean. She is now a suspect in her husband’s murder. In the water, she is rebaptized as Coventina Brown on her way to England then Eleanor Douglas in Scotland then Eleanor Bennett in the U.S. Her two children, Byron and Benedetta “Benny,” spend the length of the story deciphering their mother’s deathbed confessions through audio files before discovering they have another sibling.
The overwhelming theme of the loneliness around hiding your true identity to escape a life choice someone made for you bleeds into most of the scenes involving the character of Covey. Her gambling father forces her into an arranged marriage with an older man known for his criminal activity, and now the girl who had dreams of taking over the world of competitive swimming is running for her survival. The criminal arrangement still leads her to a life of criminality that forces her to change and steal her identity to escape trouble.
In the second episode “Coventina,” Covey labors over a pot of Chinese fish soup at her clients’ family home. She is ordered to make fish and chips for the two children she cares for as a nanny, but the homesickness is too overpowering in London. While she has access to the kitchen, she makes the soup. The maid, who is also Chinese, smells the soup and tastes it. She recognizes the dish and questions Covey about how she learned to make the soup. Covey answers that her grandmother taught her without revealing she too is Chinese. The maid leaves with suspicions. Covey can’t afford to bond with the maid over their shared ethnic identity because she is hiding her entire identity. What if the maid is a Chinese woman from Jamaica? When Covey serves the children the soup, they are disgusted and upset that fish and chips are not being served as expected. Though she is homesick, Covey is embarrassed that she tried to bring a sense of home into someone else’s home, especially serving children without developed and diverse palates. The moment is smaller than the many pivotal moments, but it stands out in demonstrating Covey’s loneliness and homesickness in such a simple light. The dinner forces her to reexamine her fear of living within the Caribbean and Chinese communities in London and wonder if the next batch of immigrants who arrive on the next ship will recognize her and turn her in to the authorities in Jamaica.
The third episode “Eleanor” shows us how Covey becomes Eleanor after assuming the identity of her upbeat roommate Eleanor, played by Karise Yansen, who is killed in a train accident as they are traveling to live a new life in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the show, she has a hard time finding a job as a Caribbean immigrant while recovering from her leg laceration from the accident. She feels she has to hide even more. It mentally takes her back to the island where she is courting Gibbs, played by Ahmed Elhaj. Since she has a boyfriend, she wants Bunny to find one, too. But Bunny, played by Lashay Anderson, doesn’t seem interested in the local boys. She confesses that she likes Covey the way she’s supposed to like boys. Covey reprimands her friend to never repeat those words and advises Bunny to pretend to like a boy out of protection. Back alone in Edinburgh, Covey as Eleanor realizes the advice she had given her friend is the advice she needs for herself to survive.
In the same episode, Covey finds a secretarial job. Out of excitement in finding employment, she wears a light pink crocheted dress with pink heels topped with white flowers on her first day. Right away, her Scottish female colleagues seem to be annoyed by her presence and make comments about the brightness of her outfit. Covey is again reminded to hide. So, the next day, she arrives in an outfit with a drabber color. When she spots accounting errors, she tries to bring the problem to Beatrice, played by Anna Mawn, the ringleader of the women in the office. She gets angry at Covey for insinuating she has made a mistake.
But Covey doesn’t feel right about the mistakes in the account. She goes to her male boss, who seems understanding of the situation. He admonishes Beatrice for ignoring the mistakes and invites Covey to dinner with his wife. The trust between Covey and her boss makes her feel seen in a positive light. Then her boss reveals that he knows Covey is lying about her identity. He points out the lack of nursing education, a lie Covey used on her résumé as part of her new identity as Eleanor. With Covey afraid to confess, her boss sexually assaults her. Beatrice notices Covey in shock returning to their room in the office. She follows Covey into the restroom, where she explains the boss had assaulted her and the other women in the office, but they all needed the job. She tells Covey to clean herself up and return to her desk. Covey is visibly upset over the ordeal and how she let her walls down to the first person who showed her attention when she was supposed to be invisible.
Covey returns to London after having her daughter, Mathilda, as a result of the assault. As the seventh episode “Birth Mother” shows a pregnant Covey trying to stay under the radar at a church, she fights to be noticed to keep her daughter. But she fails when a couple swoops baby Mathilda in a quickie adoption arranged by the nuns. Covey is running after the car carrying her baby away, but she cannot keep up.
Since Edinburgh turned out to be a disaster starting with the tragic death of her roommate, Covey puts on her cloak of invisibility in the fourth episode “Mrs. Bennett” while walking the streets of London. She notices a protest across the street, and in a perfect moment of fate, she lays her eyes on her beloved Gibbs. He is yelling into a megaphone alongside protestors, but he stops when he lays his eyes on Covey. They immediately reunite and spend time together. But one day, a Caribbean girl notices Covey. She calls out to Covey, but Covey answers to Eleanor now. The girl asks about Eleanor’s whereabouts since it was reported that Covey had died in the train accident. Covey hides behind Gibbs and explains the stress and the loneliness of hiding in plain sight. Gilbert Bennett Grant becomes Bert Bennett while Covey becomes Eleanor Bennett.
The series shows a healthy portion of the recently past present and current present with Byron, played by Ashley Thomas, and Benny, played by Adrienne Warren, who are making sense of their mother’s story and realizing why both their parents had to change their names once they started their new lives in the U.S. But the dramatic sequence of events featuring Mia Isaac as young Covey tugs on the heartstrings more since the strong emotions of disappointment, loneliness, and despair lay within Covey’s past. Throughout the series, there are flashbacks to the relatively peaceful existence Covey lived in Jamaica, even after her mother, Mathilda, left the family in hopes of finding the promise of a better life in the West. The turquoise ocean, the lanky palm trees, and the golden sunlight of the island warm the screen every time, even at times when the story shows a rough scene. The cover for the series shows a young Covey running away toward the ocean at sunset from her deadly reception. How young Covey navigates a path she stumbled onto for the sake of living her life is the root of the storyline.
The eighth episode ends with adult Bunny, a world-famous competitive swimmer played by CCH Pounder, admitting to killing Little Man with a poison Pearl was preparing for the wedding to give Covey a chance at the life she wanted. Pearl decides it is too risky to use the poison, but Bunny sneaks it into Little Man’s drink. Covey’s three grownup children — Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda, played by Sonita Henry — have joined Bunny, now known as Etta, to discover this revelation. But the TV storyline omits some of the book’s ending and opens to new possibilities of a second season.
Toward the end of the book, Etta leads Byron, Benny, and Mabel Mathilda to visit Pearl, played by Faith Alabi, in Florida. She would visit Pearl when she competitively swam in the state. Pearl is in shock that not only Covey was alive this entire time, but she raised a family with Gibbs. All the children remind her of Lin when they laugh. And Mabel looks the most like Covey, though she is considered White. Still in Florida, Etta also guides Covey’s children to their biological grandfather, who they learned with the revelations is Chinese and still alive in his 90s. After a tumultuous gambling past in Jamaica, his luck had turned in the U.S. through investments. He had a private investigator find Covey, who at the time was living as Eleanor Bennett in California, but he felt his daughter should’ve reached out to him. Though he left the island, most of the island at the time ended up in Florida instead of the U.K. in the late 1960s, so he believes Covey would’ve found him if she wanted to. These crucial reunions and meetings, for example, aren’t covered in the series, but they could add another element in a new season.
Another part of the book that failed to make it to the screen is Covey as Eleanor before her death going to see her old friend, renowned swimmer Etta Pringle, speak at a conference. Eleanor sits in the crowd, and Etta notices the face of her old friend who she believed died in a train accident in Scotland decades earlier. Eleanor gives Etta a note with a phone number. They discuss awkwardly a date to meet, but by that time, Eleanor is dead.
In the TV series’ fifth episode “Mother,” Byron gets arrested for beating Benny’s abusive ex-boyfriend on the street after Benny calls to be rescued. In the book, Byron’s girlfriend Lynette, played by Rebecca Naomi Jones in the show, calls Byron to notify him that she couldn’t make it to his mother’s funeral because her nephew had been involved in a police incident. Also in the book, Lynette gives birth to their son. But in the show, Byron finds out at the end that he will be a father when Lynette shows up to the funeral, so his parenthood can be explored in another season.
The series emphasizes a few events in the book. One example is Mabel Mathilda, who is a cultural food anthropologist who gets canceled for whitesplaining indigenous foods during a panel discussion. She is the daughter who reluctantly is given up for adoption. She was raised in a White family and not told about her adoption until Eleanor Bennett’s lawyer Charles Mitch, played by Glynn Turman, reaches out to her. Mabel is raising her son, Gio, alone, but she sends him to boarding school while she lives between London and Italy. This is shown on screen, but in the book, we see Mabel yearn for Gio to return home after noticing her neighbors’ son, who is the same age as Gio. Mabel’s husband died before Gio was born, but the series can dive deeper into Mabel’s life. The scene in the TV series where young Covey is running after the car belonging to Mabel’s adoptive parents is excruciating to the point that Mabel will have to deal with that image and bring it up with her family. She still also has to tell Gio that she is adopted, has met her biological siblings, and went to her biological mother’s funeral while lying about being on her book tour in the U.S. The show spotlights the personal lives of Byron and Benny since we meet them at the beginning of the series, while Mabel is introduced in “Mother,” therefore we have the abridged version of her reality.
Reminiscent of the visual reimagining of Natalie Baszile’s Queen Sugar by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, Black Cake keeps its story mainly intact and gives moments more space to breathe and expand. Along with author Charmaine Wilkerson, Oprah is also an executive producer for Black Cake. Thanks to showrunner Marissa Jo Cerar’s book-to-TV credits, the series tells the story with dramatic cinematographic shots. The series is so exquisitely done, but it’s due to the novel being entertaining and heart-wrenching simultaneously with the tension pulsating on every page the way it’s pulsating in every scene.
Gabrielle Union, Keith Powers, and Gina Torres add star power to the fashion-centric romantic comedy The Perfect Find based on Tia Williams’ 2016 novel. Though the film follows the storyline on pages, there are still a few touches that brought the so-called unconventional love story to life onscreen.
Jenna Jones, played by Gabrielle, is an out-of-work fashion editor still recovering from the unraveling of a 10-year relationship with millionaire entrepreneur Brian, played by the debonair D.B. Woodside. In the beginning of the story, we see Jenna floundering at her mother’s house, avoiding New York City like a plague. Her mother, played by Janet Hubert for too short of an appearance, tells Jenna she needs to go back to her life in the city. Her romantic downfall that led to her career derailment has to be on everyone’s mind since it’s still on hers.
In less than five minutes in the film, Jenna returns to her Brooklyn apartment with a chic bob and designer attire in tow. And now that she’s back at home, she needs a night out with the girls, played by Aisha Hinds and Alani “La La” Anthony. They head to a fancy party in Harlem looking for an innocent one-night stand. When Jenna feels like she ran out of luck, she falls tipsily into the arms of a younger man. They kiss, but the kiss is too much for Jenna, who finds the man’s youthful age too ridiculous to take seriously.
Bright and early the next day, she finds herself slightly humiliated in the office of her corporate archnemesis, Darcy Hill, played by Gina. Darcy laughs at the fact that Jenna has to grovel for a job when Jenna allegedly stole her jobs in the past. The competitive world of fashion journalism was a losing game for Darcy until she built her own namesake media empire at Darzine. Jenna earns the job with the expectation to produce multimedia pieces to increase digital subscriptions. Darcy assigns her twenty-something son and photographer Eric to work with Jenna to come up with these pieces. Except Eric happens to be the much-younger man Jenna was kissing the night before.
Jenna tells Eric that they can’t develop a relationship despite their natural magnetism. They even bond over vintage Black Hollywood films, thanks to the poster of starlet Nina Mae McKinney displayed in Jenna’s office. Eric is Jenna’s boss’ son. The relationship is not only unprofessional but could make Jenna the laughingstock of Black New York again with another misstep in love. When the girls try to hook Jenna up with a blind date, Jenna decides to throw a dinner party to ease the nervousness. She even invites Eric and tells him to bring friends. The more the merrier. At the party, nerves are high as Jenna realizes the blind date is not a match. So, Eric becomes a match with his cuteness and conversation. And a secret relationship between coworkers blossom.
Intimacy builds between the couple until Darcy warns Jenna to stay away from Eric romantically because she has her suspicions. Jenna disobeys that order while Eric is demanding to emerge as a public boyfriend, and not a private lover. But the volcano of secret love erupts when Darcy catches Jenna consorting inappropriately with her grown son on her cerise velvet sofa. The argument leads to Jenna being fired and Eric being upset about Jenna not telling him that his mother had an instinct about the romance.
Months pass by. It’s Christmastime. Eric is working on the documentary he always wanted to do on his murdered father Otis. Jenna reaches out to Eric. They arrange to meet at a late-night diner. What Eric believes is a simple catch-up turns out to be a surprise from Jenna with a sonogram. She’s pregnant. Eric being in his early twenties and figuring out his path in cinema make him ask for space. Darcy soon pays a visit to Jenna. Not only did Jenna date Darcy’s son, but she got pregnant by him, too? It’s a lot, but Darcy recalls when she was a first-time mother and vows to support Jenna as a grandmother.
After accepting paternity, Eric surprises Jenna at a doctor’s appointment. He confesses he still loves Jenna and invites her to the Darzine gala. The film ends with Jenna rubbing her pregnant belly alongside Eric on the red carpet. Their relationship is public, and the family Jenna always wanted is a dream come true.
The décor and fashion alone are two reasons to put your feet up and sink into the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine. Designs meant to leave you awestruck include the first time Jenna meets Darcy at the office. Jenna wears a pink cape by Nina Ricci with Stella McCartney pink silk pants, while Darcy stuns in a multicolored Manish Arora coat. Even author Tia models in the photoshoot as a glam disco geisha queen and on the red carpet in a gold sequin dress. More fashionable cameos include Remy Ma, Winnie Harlow, and Dwyane Wade, Gabrielle’s real-life husband. Jenna’s office is supposed to be a cluttered dump, but in its original iteration we see leopard and zebra print wallpaper, racks full of silky frocks, and fully dressed mannequins sitting on file cabinets. This is just motivation to create a Pinterest board for the jaw-dropping home office.
“I really wanted to see Gabrielle in a palette that I hadn’t seen her in very much in other films, a more pastel-toned palette,” said director Numa Perrier to Netflix’s blog Tudum. “When it came to Darcy — Gina Torres being such an iconic woman — we wanted to dress her to the nines. We wanted her to just be an absolute New York fashion woman who’s bold and unapologetic and takes up all the space in the room.”
One major plot adjustment is the unplanned pregnancy. In the book, Jenna and Eric don’t see each other until four years after the firing and the breakup. They spot each other at the park as Jenna watches her son Otis play and drinks a latte with Billie, the main character of Tia’s 2004 debut novel The Accidental Diva. Jenna reveals that Otis is Eric’s son and explains she kept her pregnancy a secret because she didn’t want to interfere with Eric’s budding film career. The screenplay written by Spelman College alumna Leigh Davenport, also the creator of Run the World on Starz, features the pregnancy as another plot twist at the end. With Gabrielle’s real-life fertility struggles, the moments feel more heartwarming.
Another noticeable difference is that Brian is Black in the film while he’s described as a “Jewish Adonis” in the book. And Darzine in the film is StyleZine in the book with that only being one of Darcy’s nine online women’s magazines. The must-see film is a soothing adaptation of a book that was first indie-published by Brown Girls Books and reprinted by Grand Central Publishing after the runaway success of Tia’s third adult novel Seven Days in June.
The Sex and the City reboot centers its second season’s third episode on Carrie Bradshaw narrating her story of grief for her audiobook. As she bumbles with emotion over the chapter detailing her husband’s untimely death, Carrie does everything in her power to avoid having to complete the narration.
And Just Like That… returned for its second season June 22 on Max, formerly HBO Max, and picked up where the first season left off: Carrie moving forward after the sudden death of her husband, John, better known as “Big.” The grief connects to her writing in the episode “Chapter Three.”
Traipsing around Manhattan in her iconic heels, Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is heading to the studio to record her latest book, Loved and Lost. This book fits into a different genre compared to her other books. This one is about her journey of grief after the death of Big, played by Chris Noth (Sexual assault allegations against the actor emerged immediately after his character’s demise. He denies the allegations and hasn’t been criminally charged).
Carrie’s foray into the grief memoir genre has given her an opportunity to narrate her audiobook. Most memoirists tell their stories for the audiobook, and it’s become more of a standard for memoirs about grief. But when Carrie speaks into the microphone, she keeps choking on her words, reliving the moments from the premiere episode of the series where Big dies from a heart attack after riding on his Peloton (The fitness company’s stock fell due to the negative storyline). Carrie’s male audio producers try to coach her through the annunciation issues, like she’s swallowing her t’s and popping her p’s, but they can’t pick up her frustration in reliving that distinct memory by reading it aloud.
“A memoir this personal needs to be read by the author,” her editor says after Carrie urges for an actress to be hired to record the audiobook, like Julianne Moore or Julianna Margulies. Then Carrie learns that the studio has been booked for five days. She thought it would be only for two. But the publisher already factored in extra days to accommodate the emotional hardship of reading the story. Back in the recording studio, Carrie starts to hear the water from the shower on that tragic day and sees water blurring the words on the e-book she’s reading from. The audio producers decide it’s better to skip the chapter for the time being.
After a tearful moment in the recording studio, Carrie receives advice from Bitsy Von Muffling, played by Julie Halston. Complaining about the upkeep after a facelift, fellow widow Bitsy recommends Carrie should do whatever she loves to do to make her feel better. So, Carrie goes shoe shopping. She bursts through her apartment door with Bergdorf Goodman bags filled with shoes, such as a pair of pink Gucci ankle-cuff leather pumps and copper-studded Giuseppe Zanotti Intriigo mules.
While trying on her new shoes, she calls up the main audio producer and tells him she has contracted COVID-19. Therefore, the producers need to hire that actress Carrie had suggested earlier. The viral disease that caused a yearslong global pandemic is now treatable enough that it can be a lie to get out of work. She stays in her apartment, even enjoying a hamburger and fries when her friends Seema and Anthony, played by Sarita Choudhury and Mario Cantone respectively, call her for lunch. She lies to them about her fake COVID. Seema comes to visit where Carrie admits her lie and tells her how she needs to attend her neighbor Lisette’s jewelry showcase.
At the showcase, Carrie and Seema are chatting when they see a man in a black suit pocket the jewelry on display. While they’re questioning the theft, Carrie yells that she has COVID, which clears the outside tents. Seema brandishes a handgun, which turns out to be a lighter. The jewelry is gone, and Lisette, played by Katerina Tannenbaum, is devastated. Carrie visits Lisette the next day with pastries as they mourn the loss. Mourning, even for material objects, helps Carrie prepare to narrate the chapter detailing her husband’s death in the recording studio. She celebrates with Seema, who has recovered her Birkin handbag stolen in the beginning of the episode, at a communal table with young men visiting from Australia. At the end of the episode, Carrie’s lie manifests into real COVID.
Though the writing in the reboot fails to be as crisp as the writing in the original Sex and the City series based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 book, emphasizing the hardship of narrating an audiobook about grief seems to be a realistic issue memoirists deal with.
Marketing maven Bozoma St. John, for example, went on tour earlier this year to discuss her grief memoir The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival. In the very first minutes on her audiobook, she narrates the day her husband died from a rare cancer thought to be treatable. Tembi Locke’s 2019 memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home came to life onscreen with a Netflix miniseries. She narrates the story of losing her husband to cancer elegantly for the audiobook edition. You can find the book review here.
On the other hand, Sheryl Sandberg didn’t narrate the audiobook for Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, her 2017 memoir about losing her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg. She may have been worried about being overtaken with emotion, or the publisher decided her voice wasn’t the right fit, even when more memoirists are reading their life stories. Elisa Donovan of Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame stepped in to narrate the Option B audiobook. In fact, the actress narrated the 2021 audiobook for her own grief memoir about losing her father in Wake Me When You Leave: Love and Encouragement via Dreams from the Other Side.
This a rare episode for Carrie where we see the process of her promoting her book. This is a newer process for some authors, especially for memoirists, with coming to terms to reading an audiobook, even when it draws up tough feelings. Audiobooks are more popular than ever, so publishers are banking on authors to vocalize their own stories of loss and healing.
Peacock’s Bel-Air not only united the original Ashley Banks with the new Ashley Banks, but the reboot drama united them in a storyline highlighting the near erasure of Black literature in the classroom.
The show is a serious portrayal of the 1990s NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that brought rapper Will Smith to the silver screen. The new version stars Jabari Banks, who has an uncanny resemblance to Will and holds the fictional last name of the TV family in real life. It’s still the same story of a Black teen boy from West Philadelphia who must move to the upscale Los Angeles enclave of Bel-Air with his aunt and her immediate family to stay out of trouble.
Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley in the sitcom, made a guest appearance in the second season of Bel-Air by playing teacher Ms. Hughes to the reimagined version of her former character Ashley, played by Akira Akbar.
At the elite Bel-Air Academy, Ms. Hughes gives Ashley a book, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, by Robyn C. Spencer, in the premiere episode “A Fresh Start.” Ms. Hughes asks for a two-page summary, which is an extra credit assignment since the book is outside of the curriculum.
In the second episode “Speaking Truth,” Ms. Hughes hands Ashley another book after class. This time, it’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. A White classmate glares at their exchange in the background. The look of disgust on the classmate’s face shows the concern that Ms. Hughes is showing Ashley more preference because they’re both Black. Soon, we learn a complaint has been filed against Ms. Hughes. And it’s not the first.
When Ashley later bumps into Ms. Hughes in the hallway with a box of her effects inside, she asks why the teacher is leaving. Ms. Hughes gives Ashley words of encouragement, but Ashley is obviously devastated that her favorite teacher, one of the very few Black teachers in the school, is gone.
Ashley tells her parents Vivian, played by Cassandra Freeman, and Phil, played by Adrian Holmes, about Ms. Hughes’ firing. They discover that Ms. Hughes was let go over providing books outside of the approved curriculum at a parent advisory committee meeting. Vivian even lists the authors Ashley is now exposed to because of Ms. Hughes’ influence, such as James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison, and Paula Giddings.
Will, Ashley’s cousin, and Carlton, Ashley’s brother played by Olly Sholotan, get involved by bringing the issue to the high school’s Black Student Union in an effort to keep Carlton elected as class president by maintaining the Black student vote. A protest comes up as the best response to Ms. Hughes’ firing. Except Carlton has a chance to win the school’s highest student award and be the first Black student to win the award. The BSU adviser, who is Black, dissuades Carlton to plan the protest; it’s not worth sacrificing the award over a fired teacher who wasn’t following the rules.
The third episode “Compromise” shows the BSU dealing with the administration’s threat to suspend them all if members and allies walk out during classes. Then Carlton and BSU president strike a deal with the administration: Students can walk out but can’t make speeches or hold signs. The middle school students like Ashley are already barred from participating in the walkout.
On the day of the walkout at 11 a.m., Carlton leads participating students to the quad in protest of not only Ms. Hughes being fired but also in support for a more inclusive curriculum. The pressure to go against the compromise made with the administration revs up Carlton’s anxiety. Will says he has Carlton’s back as he takes a large sign and runs up staircases to end up on the roof. He unrolls a sign that reads “Black Teachers Matter.” With a raised fist, he starts the chant “Black Teachers Matter.” Students below join in the chant.
According to Tatyana’s Instagram post, this episode is her last appearance, so the Ms. Hughes storyline may end there. But how students are walking out in protest over demanding inclusive curricula is an example of art imitating life.
Students in Virginia walked out last fall due to Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transgender student policies. Last month, students across Florida walked out to protest Governor Ron DeSantis’ plans to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at colleges and universities.
At the root of the issue in Bel-Air is that a Black female teacher mentored a Black female student by giving her books that would never be read in the classroom or approved for a syllabus at a predominantly White upper-crust school. But the mentorship was severed by complaints from other classmates not getting the same attention.
To be fair, unfairness should be reported in situations like classroom settings where teacher favoritism could affect your grades, but that part of the conversation is not discussed. The repercussions of firing a Black teacher over providing Black stories go deeper with dismantling a literary mentorship that had already opened a student’s mind.
One in five Black or African American private school teachers worked at schools with less than 25% enrollment of students of color, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That shows how rare a relationship is between a Black teacher and a Black student at a predominantly White private school.
Out of 3,420 children’s books in 2021, 36% were “books by and about Black, Indigenous and People of Color,” per data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison. As books by authors of color seem to see higher rates of bans and attempts at bans, students of all backgrounds may not know about those books if they’re not available to them at school or the public library. Hence, Ms. Hughes giving Ashley books on the side to read that explore the experiences and identities of people of African descent is viewed as an act of defiance.
Although the storyline is rooted in students demanding a more inclusive curriculum, the issue of approved literature impacts many educators who are currently witnessing conflicts with some of their local and state regulators restricting what is taught in classrooms.
A wife must come to terms with losing her husband and uniting her family abroad as they grieve in the Netflix series From Scratch. Based on the best-selling memoir by actress Tembi Locke, the series’ last episode summarizes the grief that is expressed throughout the book.
In the last episode, Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, brought her husband Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, home to palliative care as his rare soft-tissue cancer worsened with no cure in sight. After a few days of bittersweet heartache, Lino dies. When Amy meets with palliative care counselor in “Between the Fire and the Pan” episode, she’s told to bring her daughter, Idalia, played by Isla Colbert, to Lino after he passes. She does that in the beginning of this episode to let her daughter grieve her father.
The grieving process is palpable. Amy later collapses as her mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and her sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, bathe her in the bathtub as she uncontrollably cries. We don’t hear the grief as instrumental music drowns them out. Amy then stays in bed while her family takes over her house. Zora tells Amy that she’s afraid of her slipping away. Amy breaks down that she can’t fly to Sicily to bring Lino’s ashes home. She doesn’t have the energy; she already gave her all.
FINDING HOME IN SICILY
Amy finds herself driving on the rollercoaster roads of Sicily with Idalia in the backseat, along with Lino’s ashes. They follow the directions to Lino’s family’s home, where they are greeted by the entire town led by Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo. Amy rises out of the car and presents Lino’s ashes to his mother. Filomena gets teary as she carries the urn high in a solemn parade through the narrow alleys to her house.
The priest comes to the house for the blessing while Filomena breaks down. Idalia gets agitated about the overwhelming emotion in the room. Amy carries her to their guest room where she explains they are leaving Lino in Sicily. Idalia thought her father would come back with them to Los Angeles. After the blessing, Filomena tells Idalia she can see her father anytime in her imagination. All in black, the family later goes on another trek to bury Lino as the townspeople bow in respect.
The next day, Filomena makes Amy breakfast, consoling her about the everlasting heartbreak of losing a husband. Filomena’s husband and Lino’s father Giacomo, played by Paride Benassai, dies in the episode “Heirlooms,” a year after visiting the family in LA in the “Bread and Brine” episode. Neither of Lino’s parents attend the wedding for Amy and Lino that takes place in Italy, a sore spot in the “A Villa. A Broom. A Cake.” episode that continues to emerge throughout the series. This is not the first time they have spoken, but it’s the first time Amy has been in the family household and is being treated with care by her semi-estranged mother-in-law.
Amy goes to a wine bar for a moment of peace away from her family. She’s the only woman there. The older Sicilian men watch her in suspicion. Not only is she American, but she is Black, and they have probably never seen someone who looks like her up close. The town’s mayor shares his condolences with Amy. She walks out of the bar and notices the women hanging outside on their patios watch her walk back to Filomena’s house. In Italian, they comment on her darker complexion. Amy thinks it’s comical that they don’t realize she understands Italian as she heads home. For another break, she runs up the hills around the town and sneaks a peek of the Mediterranean Sea as the backdrop to rolling green hills. That’s her moment of peace.
TOWN GOSSIP
“Grief in Sicily is not an individual experience but a communal one where people are called upon to witness and support one another,” Tembi writes in the book where she recounts her life with her late husband Saro, who died from cancer. “The way certain African cultures use drumming as an active means of dealing with their grief—the rhythm is played continuously for days, day and night, over and over, as a constant reminder to the community of its loss—in Sicily the story of the deceased is told over and over.”
In the show, the mourning tour continues as Filomena brings Amy and Idalia to other townspeople’s homes to sit and relive memories of Lino. At one home, Idalia gets sick eating too much candy. The nosy women notice Idalia gripping her tummy once they’re outside and convince Filomena to take this opportunity to see the doctor’s house. Nobody has really seen the so-called palace-like interior. The women want to know what’s inside the massive house. Amy can’t believe she’s being wrapped up in town gossip.
Filomena takes Idalia’s hand as they head to the doctor’s mysterious home. He invites them inside to sit with them in the their mourning. They notice a photo of the doctor with Lino framed on a side table. The two are standing outside the restaurant in Florence where Amy and Lino fell in love in the debut episode “First Tastes.” The doctor explains he had visited Florence and met with Lino years ago. He now prays often for Lino. The unexpected visit becomes the most impactful. Once they leave, the women swarm around the family to hear what they saw. Idalia tells them that she saw several chandeliers inside. This satisfies the town gossipers.
That night, Amy dreams of Lino. She finds him in the kitchen in Sicily cooking her a meal. They embrace. Then she wakes up. She can see him whenever she wants. In the morning, she learns Filomena wants her to meet with the family lawyer. Filomena doesn’t give Amy details until Amy finds herself beside her sister-in-law being asked by the lawyer to sign papers. It’s a deed to the land. Now that Lino as the oldest son is gone, Amy inherits the farmland. She refuses to sign the paperwork.
While resting back at the house, Amy is summoned. A dispute over a car accident with the town’s mayor has broken out with a driver who speaks English. The driver tells Amy that the mayor hit his car. Amy explains to the driver that the man in the car is the mayor, and with the townspeople crowding the area, the mayor will win the argument. The driver takes the loss and speeds away. The townspeople cheer for Amy. She’s one of their own.
SANT’ANNA
Amy goes to church with Filomena while it’s empty. Filomena is praying to Saint Anne or Sant’Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, the grandmother of Jesus Christ. She says she prayed to this saint when Amy and Lino married, when Lino died. She wants Amy to make Sicily her home. That’s why she sent her to the lawyer’s office to inherit the land. Later, Amy brings Idalia to the spot she had found while running where the hills and the sea create a picturesque vision of peace. Amy tells Idalia that this is where Lino still feels alive because it’s their home.
Sant’Anna’s Day falls on Amy’s birthday. Sant’Anna is the patron saint of travelers and widows. It’s the opportune time to celebrate Lino.
“These women pray to her in times of difficulty and times of celebration,” Tembi writes in the book. “I had also learned that she was the patron saint of widows and travelers. I was born on her day, July 26. I was married on her day. For the people of Aliminusa, that meant she was my personal saint. ‘You drew a good card,’ Nonna told me.” Her family comes to Sicily to join in the Sant’Anna Day procession that starts with a prayer then ends with the band playing in celebration. She describes the moment as the “magic hour,” a phrase in cinematography describing “the moment when the diffused rays of the sun make everything more beautiful.”
Magic hour happens onscreen for Amy’s family, who flies from LA and Texas, to join Amy, Idalia, and Lino’s family as they celebrate life. The joyous and heart-wrenching event ends the series.
Netflix’s limited series From Scratch follows a couple affected by cancer, but after years of remission, they’re seeing cancer rear its ugly head again right when they feel like they’re back on track.
Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, and Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, have just found out that Lino’s rare soft-tissue cancer has made a return after seven years in remission. Seven years ago, they weren’t parents to their adopted daughter, Idalia, played by Isla Colbert. They try to strategize how to talk to their young daughter about Lino’s cancer spreading to this lungs.
The family has a picnic at the park, where Idalia wants to share her ice cream cone with Lino. But Amy has to tell her that her father can’t have ice cream because he’s sick. Immediately, Idalia puts her ice cream cone down, as if she knows the history of the cancer and the possibility of its return.
Later, Amy cuts Lino’s hair in their home’s garden. It has become a sanctuary for them to grow the seeds of foods from Sicily that are necessary for Lino’s authentic Sicilian cooking. When Lino was first diagnosed with cancer in the “Bitter Almonds” episode, he cut his hair alone in the bathroom amid his chemotherapy treatments. But now Amy makes sure she’s present for Lino as he sacrifices a part of himself for his illness.
Amy’s mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, takes turns sitting with Lino during his chemo treatments. On Zora’s shift, Lino gets a spiked fever. He’s rushed to the hospital as Zora calls Amy. The family is back in the hospital monitoring Lino. Amy learns that Lino was taking anti-anxiety meds that may have contributed to his fever.
Lino’s condition worsens. Nurses and doctors keep ignoring Amy’s pleas to find out what’s wrong with Lino. They tell Amy that they can only talk to family. Since Amy is Black and so are the family members in LA, the racism patients and their families experience in the hospital is on full display. Amy notifies the carousel of doctors that she is Lino’s wife and deserves straight answers, but she’s not getting any straight answers.
When the rest of Amy’s family arrives from Texas, Amy receives a call from Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo. Filomena tells Amy that she had a dream of the Virgin Mary. The Lord is calling Lino home. Amy absorbs the heartbreaking premonition and leans into finding out why her husband is deteriorating.
Meanwhile, Lino is so sick that he’s considered infectious, so children are not allowed in the wing of the hospital where he’s receiving care. This adds more distress to Amy because Idalia cannot see her father. The family devises a way to sneak Idalia inside to spend time with her father. Idalia sits beside Lino as they read a book together. The touching moment inspires Amy to later have dinner alone with Lino while he’s propped up in his hospital bed. Lino asks Amy to go back to her life during his recovery. But they still don’t have answers on what the recovery will entail.
Lino is not getting better. Amy calls Lino’s oncologist about the hepatologist also treating Lino. The oncologist says Lino needs a liver transplant. Amy chases the hepatologist down in the parking garage, where the doctor tries to stay mum after hours but then reveals Lino’s liver is failing. After finally receiving a confirmation, Amy yells at the hepatologist for not being straight with her. None of the many specialists treating Lino seem to be communicating as Lino undergoes countless tests. As Lino’s condition worsens even under this magnitude of surveillance, Amy notices an advertisement for palliative care.
Amy and the palliative care specialist talk about giving Lino care as his body dies. He needs comfort at this point. Continuing medical care is pointless and expensive. Amy notifies Filomena about the decision. Lino leaves the hospital via ambulance as their home is prepared for his last days.
Within days, Lino requests a party to see family and friends at their home’s garden. Amy detects his burst of energy, but their family friend Preston, played by Rodney Gardiner, gives Amy the voice of reason that sometimes a burst of energy reinvigorates someone who is dying. The loved ones surround Lino in the garden.
CARING FAMILY
The frustration of seeing a loved one suffer in their condition mirrors the book, where memoirist Tembi Locke describes her journey of falling in love with her husband to caring for him as he dies from a rare cancer. A parade of specialists go in and out of her late husband Saro’s hospital room.
“Suddenly we had descended into a medical landscape of dueling specialists, expert professionals each of whom saw one piece of the puzzle that was Saro’s body,” Tembi writes. “I was the only one looking at the whole of his life, his body, his heartfelt desires. I tried to humanize the patient behind the chart.”
The discrimination is another aspect. Tembi’s omnipresence in the hospital room is not enough for medical staff to understand she’s the main point of contact for her husband’s care.
“As the heads of hepatology, endocrinology, immunology, gastroenterology, and orthopedic surgery made their rounds, I succumbed to writing my name on the hospital room whiteboard: ‘CARING FAMILY: Tembi, wife. Black woman sitting in the corner.’ It was my response after two nurses had asked me if I was ‘the help.'”
Experiencing racism as a caretaker puts added stress on the situation. With some of the book’s elements changed for the screen, this is a situation that needed to be shown that even in a matter of illness, a person’s skin color can impact the information they receive to deal with the illness. It’s one of the several moments throughout the TV series and the book that shows an interracial couple receiving backlash for their union. Even when it’s a matter of life and death, medical care may be subpar. We see in the next episode that when the patient and their family take matters into their own hands, they can live the rest of their lives on their terms.
The sixth episode of Netflix’s limited series From Scratch shows a couple affected by cancer deciding to expand their family after a loss.
The critically acclaimed memoir of the same name by actress Tembi Locke follows her love path with her late husband Saro and how she ventures to his homeland of Sicily with their daughter after his death. The show features a fictional adaptation of her story.
It’s fall 2006, 18 months after Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, is declared cancer-free. He learns his father has died suddenly from a heart attack in the fields he farmed in Sicily. Consoled by his wife Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, Lino thinks it’s time for them to be parents. His cancer has been at bay with a clinical trial ending.
Like many couples, they begin looking at in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination for the chance of having a biological child. Amy feels overwhelmed about the prospects of putting her body through a lot of changes to have a baby. She doesn’t have a problem with adopting a baby, and Lino realizes he feels the same way.
Six months later, Amy and Lino are in the wedding party for Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler. As soon as the ceremony ends, Amy and Lino receive the call for their daughter. They rush to the hospital to meet with the birth mother, a UCLA student who says she and the baby’s father can finish school without worry now that their daughter will be placed with the right couple.
She explains the couple’s adversity with their interracial and intercultural union and battle with cancer are the reasons why she thought they’d be good parents. The birth mother appears to be Asian while the birth father appears to be Black, making the baby biracial. Lino leaves the room to give Amy and the birth mother more privacy. Amy learns the baby reminds the birth mother of her grandmother, Rose. She adds Rose as a middle name for Idalia, which she says means “behold the sun” in Italian.
In an interview before the series premiered, Tembi said her daughter Zoela chose the name Idalia for the character based on her.
Baby Idalia goes home where Amy’s mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, and her stepmother Maxine, played by Judith Scott, have a fight. A natural health enthusiast, Lynn suggests Amy buy breast milk online to feed Idalia. But Maxine thinks buying bodily fluids from random women on the internet is a bad idea. Maxine, who was unable to birth her own children, feels that her insight is ignored simply because she never gave birth.
“Heirlooms” is the chapter in the memoir marking one year after Saro’s death. Tembi is fielding phone calls from her family members who are flying to Los Angeles from Texas to be with her and eight-year-old Zoela on the anniversary. The chapter name is not for heirloom tomatoes but for fava beans grown from Sicilian seeds in their LA garden. Tembi tells her mother-in-law she plans to serve fava beans to her family and friends in commemoration of her late husband.
“She knew about the heirloom beans, passed down through generations in Sicily, that we had been growing every year,” she writes. “It made her happy to imagine them growing in foreign soil, feeding us thousands of miles away. She gave me tips on how to keep the beans creamy once pureed… I hung up the phone and looked at the pile of fava beans. Some people have heirloom jewelry. I had fava beans.”
Zoela’s adoption story similar to Idalia’s is featured in the chapter “Something Great.”
“My family had welcomed my cousin into our kin by way of international adoption just one year before Saro and I had walked down the aisle,” Tembi writes. “I was watching her grow up from a distance, seeing her at holidays and family gatherings. I saw the joy in her parents’ eyes. I saw the love. I saw the way adoption was deeply intentional and expanding. I saw another way a family could be formed, and I was hooked.”
Like in the show with Amy and Lino, Tembi and Saro decide to be honest about the cancer in the medical history section of their adoption application. After three months, they are placed with their daughter. The call about her birth comes when Tembi is at a Pilates class in LA’s Silver Lake. The couple flies to San Francisco to pick up their daughter.
“We told the birth mom what we planned to name the baby: Zoela. Saro and I loved the name, an ancient Italian moniker meaning ‘piece of the earth,'” Tembi writes. “We thought it symbolic for the child who had brought strangers together. Her name reflected the diversity of her biology and cultures. She was African American, Filipina, Italian, and even, Saro added, Sicilian.”
Back to the show’s episode, Lino undergoes a scan. Him dropping his wedding ring into a plastic tray while dressed in a hospital gown before heading into the scan becomes a regular shot throughout the series. He’s always being checked for cancer. Upon his new fatherhood, he remains cancer-free, for now.
QUALITY TIME
Fast forward to fall 2011. Idalia is a four-year-old sous chef in Lino’s kitchen when she flips a frittata. Idalia and Lino chat about her school’s social scene with the kids and their mothers. Lino is a stay-at-home dad while Amy carries on with her art career to support the family. With Lino still using a cane because of the cancer starting in his knee, he’s still unable to stand for long hours in a kitchen as a chef.
Seeing the close bond between Lino and Idalia, Amy starts to feel jealous that she doesn’t get enough time with Idalia since she’s the sole breadwinner. She confides in Zora that she hates how cancer has disrupted their lives. Lino not being able to work and getting checked for cancer have put a strain on their relationship, Amy shares. She’s upset about her jealousy since the time Lino has with Idalia is precious.
At home, Amy is struggling to keep up with yet another conversation about Idalia’s friends and their mothers and who’s bringing what to a potluck. She finally breaks down to Lino with letting him know she’s jealous of the bonding time he has with their daughter. Lino argues he’s jealous, too. He can’t work as a chef; he can’t do the job he loves.
The episode jumps to spring 2014 where Amy has cut her hours at work to spend more time with Idalia. Lino starts a cooking class, where he can do what he loves in a controlled amount of time.
One day, they eat corndogs together at home. Lino fell for corndogs in the second episode of the series when he goes to an American supermarket for the first time. But this time, Lino chokes on the corndog. Though he tells Amy the corndog bite went down the wrong hole, Lino looks concerned while looking at his family, who are chatting and eating away unaware of the concern.
Lino gets another scan. While waiting for his results, he plans a date night with Amy. They dance carefully. Amy notices a bad rash on Lino’s wrist. Later in their bathroom, Amy finds a hospital bracelet and notices Lino had a scan without telling her. All signs are pointing to the cancer making a return; a reality they tried to avoid, and have avoided, for several years. Now as parents, the stakes are higher. Lino’s concern has transferred to Amy.
Christmas 2004 opens up the fifth episode of From Scratch when the parents of Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, arrive in Los Angeles to care for their son who’s battling a rare soft-tissue cancer.
Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, is standing at the end of the escalator with her mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, as they wait for Lino’s father Giacomo, played by Paride Benassai, and Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo, to come down to their level in the airport. Amy has to run up the escalator to help them since they probably never used one before. Once they all arrive at the house, Lino becomes the focus.
Filomena rushes to her bedridden son while Giacomo stops before the front door and remains in the garden. As a lifelong farmer, he sees myriad mistakes in the boxes where plants like garlic and parsley are growing. He stays outside to tend to the garden.
Inside, Filomena opens up her heavy suitcase to reveal glass jars of pastas, spices, herbs, and tomatoes. She cooks a hearty meal for Lino, but Amy has to tell her that Lino can’t eat that type of meal on his medications. Lino gets jealous others get to eat his mother’s cooking, so he stuffs his face. And, of course, he gets nauseous before his scheduled stay in the hospital.
The transportation of the food happens in the memoir by Tembi Locke as she tells the story of falling in love with her late husband Saro and moving through the stages of grief with her daughter in Saro’s homeland of Sicily.
“Bread and Brine” is the name of a chapter. With the book mostly focusing on Tembi’s time in Sicily after her husband dies, the chapter shows the relationship between Tembi and her mother-in-law Croce, who cooks as she grieves.
“She had never let me cook in her house. Never. Not even her chef son was allowed to,” Tembi writes. “No matter how many nights I slept under her roof, no matter how many times she washed my bras and ironed my underwear, I was her guest. Even if I was also family. She preferred to work alone, at her own pace; she didn’t want company while she cooked. In the past, I had just passed through, made small talk, but had never lingered from start to finish. She, like many women in town, saw their time at the stove as their domain. I was forbidden to even set the table.”
coffee break
As Lino recovers from surgery, Giacomo finally comes to greet his son in the hospital bed. They have a small heart-to-heart when Lino says he would like a cup of coffee. This gives Giacomo a spring in his step as he walks around the hospital in search of coffee without knowing English. He finds a doctor who seems to know a bit of Italian who helps him use the coffee machine. He tells a story about seeing Lino in the hospital when he was a kid who had broken a bone, but now it’s different.
When he returns to the hospital room, he sees Amy’s father Hershel, played by Keith David, bonding with Lino. Standing by the door, he notices the connection between the two, blossoming over his absence from his son’s life at a time when he expanded his family.
Lino soon comes home, where his family and friends sit down to watch football, also known as soccer, on the Italian channels. Giacomo asks one of Lino’s friends about his son. As they talk about kids, Lino becomes increasingly irritated because the chemotherapy has threatened his reproductivity. He gets up and leaves with his crutch.
IT COULD GET WORSE
For a moment of escape, Amy runs to her and Lino’s mutual friend Preston, played by Rodney Gardiner, to drink scotch and talk. He welcomes the opportunity, especially when he’s just watching the Black Christmas classic Holiday Heart starring Ving Rhames as a drag queen helping a girl and her drug-addicted mother. Amy is upbeat about Lino’s surgery to remove the cancer. But Preston has other thoughts. He offers the possibility that Lino may never quite fully recover; the cancer can return.
The doctor tells Amy and Lino that the surgery was successful, but recurrence is possible. Lino describes cancer as “like a weed” to his parents, who learn they have to tame their excitement over the surgery.
Since the surgery was technically a success, Lino now qualifies for a clinical trial. He announces the news at dinner with the entire family. Then Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, announces her engagement to her longtime boyfriend Ken, played by Terrell Carter. The family congratulates the happy couple. Even Giacomo stands up ready to give a toast. Lino is in disbelief. His own father who didn’t go to his wedding is happy an unrelated couple is getting married. The bright mood plummets.
Going back to the book, Tembi brings Saro and his parents to her native Texas to meet her family. Saro’s parents enjoy a Houston Texans football game and struggle to figure out the art of eating Texas Barbecue. Tembi catches her mother-in-law taking in the scene, looking at her son constantly until she turns to Tembi’s sister Attica Locke, who serves as the head of the Netflix series, to tell her her surprise about Saro being welcomed in America.
“And as I sat there with everyone eating—not just consuming food but sharing our dreams, our aspirations, our histories—I could see how the stakes, the specter of illness, had changed all our lives,” Tembi writes. “What was important had changed. We were far from the wedding in Florence, reading telegrams from the half of our family who had refused to come because of race and fear. That trip to Houston was the first time we didn’t have to wonder what it would have been like to have both parts of who we were together in the same room.”
The next morning on the show, Lino and Giacomo clear the air with a hug as Lino’s parents head out for their flight to Sicily. The cancer is gone, and the family is at peace until the next monumental changes come along.
Delivering a cake to a Sicilian baker’s third cousin leads to a new job opportunity for Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, in From Scratch as Amy’s husband Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, fulfills his dream of being the head chef in his own restaurant.
The Netflix drama is based on the best-selling memoir of the same name by actress Tembi Locke about her relationship with her late husband Saro, who succumbs to cancer, and her journey through the grief in Saro’s homeland of Sicily.
In the limited series, Amy starts volunteering at the Watts Tower with teaching kids art. She feels more of a purpose as a volunteer compared to her job at an upscale art gallery. When her boss calls her to convince a client to keep their work in the gallery in the middle of a volunteer session, Amy realizes she would rather make the community gig full-time.
Meanwhile, Lino loses his job. The greasy Italian restaurant he had been working at since he moved to Los Angeles is closing over loss of business. The owner says he’ll keep the building, but operations will cease. Lino asks if he could finally cook his own authentic Sicilian cuisine in an experimental dining experience. The owner agrees, making Lino the head chef of the new iteration.
Amy wrestles with her decision for the lower-paying job, so she calls her father Hershel, played by Keith David, for advice. Hershel reminds her that she’s a married woman who needs to discuss the life-changing decision with her husband.
When Amy and Lino come together to talk through their career moves, they convince each other to follow their dreams.
ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
A banner for L’Isola, Lino’s test run of a dining experience, hangs over the old restaurant’s signage for opening night.
Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, brings her former NFL boyfriend Ken, played by Terrell Carter, to the new restaurant. Zora is acting on Amy’s advice to introduce her boyfriend to their mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith.
Frenzied by serving patrons, Amy tells Zora that she did not expect the introduction to happen on the opening night of her husband’s restaurant. But Zora explains that they would all be under the same roof, so it makes the most sense until Lynn rebuffs Ken every time he shares information about himself. The introduction is a fail, especially without Amy being able to sit down with her family to be a mediator. Zora becomes upset with Amy for the bad advice.
A DREAM DEFERRED
One day, Lino comes home after a long day at work complaining about pain in his knee. Amy checks the knee and notices it’s swollen. Noting the hardened texture, she suggests Lino should see an orthopedic doctor.
Amy reaches out to Zora for an orthopedic doctor since Ken would know one with his professional football background. Zora becomes enraged; she feels she’s being used by her needy younger sister again. She gives Amy the information but warns her about her dependence.
At the doctor’s office, the scan of Lino’s knee leads to a referral to an oncologist. Lino eventually gets diagnosed with a rare soft-tissue cancer. Right away, Lino is rushed to chemotherapy, as Amy suddenly becomes a caretaker.
Though L’Isola is getting rave reviews, the trial restaurant closes immediately without Lino being able to be on-site as the head chef. Amy must convince her former unfeeling boss at the art gallery to give her contract work in order to keep her health insurance policy. She doesn’t share Lino’s diagnosis, but her sobbing convinces the boss to help her.
Zora comes by the house to see what happened to Lino’s restaurant. As soon as she’s at the door, Lino collapses behind Amy. They rush Lino to the hospital, where he has to stay. Amy reveals to her family Lino’s cancer diagnosis and how it has already upended their lives.
THE BITTER AND THE SWEET
The name of the episode, “Bitter Almonds,” is also the name of a chapter in the memoir. But the book focuses more on life in Sicily after Tembi’s husband Saro dies from cancer. During her time of grief with Saro’s mother, Tembi receives a heavy bag of almonds from a neighbor in the town who said the almonds were from a cousin of Saro’s mother. When Tembi brings the almonds to the home, she realizes she brought another chore to the kitchen. Cracking the nuts open becomes a worthwhile experience to taste authentic Sicilian almonds.
“Bitterness, Sicilians understand, is an essential flavor both in food and in life. It has shaped the island’s culinary identity. There is no sweet without bitter. The poetry of island tells us that the same is true of the Sicilian heart.”
Saro’s cancer diagnosis is first detailed in the chapter “At the Table,” where Tembi describes the hardship of becoming a caretaker while still working as an actress. They are exhausted from the medical situation until Saro suggests Tembi should “take a lover.” They can’t enjoy their time together as he gets sicker. The swift transition came with her husband’s chemo rounds and knee surgery. The cancer is still a secret to his family.
“Many rounds of chemo, three hospital stays, and a major surgery later, Saro still had not told his parents about his diagnosis,” Tembi writes. They soon have to notify his family, who fly to LA. Like in the next episode where Amy must pick up Lino’s parents at the airport stateside and prepare mentally on how to deal with the parents who have failed to build a relationship with her.
In the third episode of From Scratch, we make an 18-month jump to summer 2004 where Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, and Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, are touring their wedding venue, a duchess’ mansion in Florence.
When they’re talking to the duchess about paying for their reservation, the duchess repeats how she needs the deposit in full. The microaggression from the duchess becomes a laughing matter when Amy and Lino meet with friends because they know the duchess, like many others, didn’t expect to see a Black American woman with a Sicilian man wanting to marry in an Italian mansion.
The series is a fictional adaptation of From Scratch by Tembi Locke, who tells the story of how she fell in love with her husband and how she fell in love with his country after his untimely death from cancer. This episode covers the wedding that doesn’t stray away too far from the memoir.
FAMILY MATHEMATICS
Before family arrives, Amy and Lino joke about him meeting her entire family. Lino will be baptized as a Texan, Amy laughs. Lino asks if that means he’ll be dipped in barbecue sauce. Amy giggles and says the choice condiment would be hot sauce.
What is unspoken between them is Lino’s family is not coming to the wedding. With his father still angry about his decisions to leave Sicily for education, career, and now a wife, Lino will have to lean on Amy’s family.
Like clockwork, Amy’s father, Hershel, played by Keith David, arrives in Florence in Texan cowboy attire, along with a crowd of their family members. The Black family dominates the guest list, and they’re wondering why the Sicilian family is not present. They compare the commute times from Houston to Dallas with Florence to Sicily, both trips an hourlong flight. How did they come halfway around the world while the much closer other side didn’t bother to show up?
At the low-key bachelorette slumber party, Amy asks her older sister, Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, if it’s OK to get married without her future in-laws in attendance at the wedding. As the day gets closer, the hope they will show up is dissipating.
Meanwhile in Castelleone, Sicily, Lino’s mother Filomena, played by Lucia Sardo, is visibly upset about not being able to attend her son’s wedding. She’s from another generation, as in she obeys her husband, Lino’s father Giacomo, played by Paride Benassai, disapproves of Lino’s actions. In fact, Giacomo calls Lino a “disgrace.”
It’s the wedding day. Amy gets her something old, something borrowed, something blue from Zora, her mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith; her stepmother Maxine, played by Judith Scott; and her grandmother Evelyn, played by Greta Sesheta.
With the men, Lino is christened with Texas-shaped cuff links from Hershel. Though his father is not there, Lino can now depend on his father-in-law.
Before they walk down the aisle outside on the terrace, Amy and Lino meet inside the mansion. They console each other that they will be fine getting married without his parents there.
Image: Netflix
The Sicilan side did not show up in the book either. At least Tembi’s late husband Saro’s immediate family was not there, but an aunt and uncle-in-law had shown up.
“Unbeknown to us, they had driven down using the address on the invitation I had sent them. They had told no one they were coming, not Saro’s mother, not Saro’s father. To do so would have been a family betrayal. Still, there they were. Saro was speechless, moved to tears by their gesture. And for the first time, I sensed what we had missed in not having is parents there. My heart opened wide.”
After exchanging vows and jumping the broom, they have dinner. Lynn rises from her seat for a toast and advises the new married couple to not allow pebbles of problems pile up into a boulder. When there are too many peddles impeding growth, then a couple may never get past that boulder. She says she had that problem with Hershel. The moment becomes tense between the divorced couple, but Hershel finds a way to end the toast as guests drink their wine. Everyone later dances the Harlem Shuffle under string lights on the terrace.
PEBBLES TURN INTO BOULDERS
Amy and Lino embark on a trip to Sicily. Lino couldn’t return to the U.S. without seeing his family, although they refused to come to the wedding. Once on Sicilian ground, he calls his family’s home. His father picks up and warns him to not come near the house. Devastated, Lino says they can go back home. Amy says no; they can still enjoy their time.
At the hotel, Amy calls the house herself. Lino’s sister Biagia, played by Roberta Rigano, answers the phone this time, cradling a baby daughter who’s never met her uncle. Amy explains Lino wants to see the family badly. Biagia says it’d be impossible for her and her mother to see Lino; the very action will bring shame to the family for disobeying the patriarch.
Later, Giacomo comes inside the house and takes off his boots. Filomena notices a pebble in one of the boots that she slides into her apron’s pocket. It symbolizes the pebbles, or the problems, that could pile up in a marriage, per Lynn’s wedding toast.
The next day, while Amy and Lino walk around the farmers market, Lino spots his father bringing a merchant some of his crops. Lino and Giacomo lock eyes, but Giacomo jumps into his truck and speeds away.
At home, Filomena scrimps on Giacomo’s meal by barely adding any tomato sauce to his spaghetti. This deliberate action eats away at her so that she tells her priest during confession. The priest asks why would she do that as a dutiful wife. She explains the fractured relationship she now has with her son, including missing his wedding, because she must obey her husband.
As Amy and Lino are leaving the hotel after a fruitless effort to see his family, Lino notices his mother, his sister, and his baby niece. They sit down outside to catch up, but not for very long. Filomena and Biagia must go before Giacomo notices anything is amiss. They return to the priest’s car and drive away.
The memoir has Tembi surprising Saro with a trip to Sicily months after the wedding. They stayed in a hotel and shared their schedule with Saro’s sister Franca. This brought different family members, mostly cousins, to their hotel to meet with Saro and Tembi. Then finally, Saro’s parents came.
“As we passed bread, no one referenced the previous years. There was no grand apology or even gesture of regret for time lost. We just ate and carried forward as if starting our relationship from that moment.” Tembi goes on to write that she ate “pasta with local capers and a simple tomato sauce that pleased my palate like no other.”
CAKE DELIVERY
On this trip, Tembi and Saro are saddled with a dry cake a local baker gives them. The cake, or “the traditional cake of Polizzi Generosa,” is supposed to be delivered to actor Vincent Schiavelli, known for his roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ghost, and Batman Returns. Once they’re back in Los Angeles, Tembi calls her agent about how to contact Vincent. The actor himself calls and comes over to pick up the cake.
This is dramatized with Amy and Lino being in the same predicament looking for a distant cousin of a Sicilian baker who lives in LA like them. Amy uses her contacts at the art gallery to find the cousin, who happens to work at the Watts Towers art installation, which was created by Italian immigrant artist Sabato “Simon” Rodia. The cousin also gets his cake.
The cake leads to more for Amy as she wrestles with a major career decision right when she and Lino are stabilizing their married lives.
The second episode of Netflix’s new drama From Scratch based on Tembi Locke‘s heart-wrenching memoir about her love journey with her late husband has the young couple move to Los Angeles for a fresh start.
It’s November 2002 where Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, and Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, have finally united in the City of Angels after an 18-month long-distance relationship. They live with Amy’s sister Zora, played by Danielle Deadwyler, as they look for jobs in their preferred fields. While Amy works in an upscale Hollywood art gallery with an international flair, Lino is only able to get a job at an American Italian restaurant that serves plates piled with questionable-looking spaghetti and meatballs.
WORKING FOR THE MAN
At the gallery, Amy sells a photographic piece featuring girls in burqas resembling basketball jerseys for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. The fact she can recall Kobe’s fluency in Italian due to a military upbringing seals the deal with the man who says he’ll buy the piece. Office politics makes Amy’s boss upset, but the sale translates into a greater deal of respect.
On the other hand, Lino leaves work early because of slow days at the restaurant. He gets restless. As Thanksgiving approaches, he asks Zora if he could help with the grocery list. Lino heads to Jons, one of LA’s supermarket fixtures, for a trip where he discovers frozen corn dogs.
The scene features a Jons employee showcasing the corndog samples played by Nick Locke, the brother of author Tembi and their showrunner sister Attica Locke, who’s also an award-winning mystery novelist. Their other brother, Doug Locke, makes a cameo as a receptionist at the art gallery. When Lino and Zora bond over the grocery list, one of Tembi’s first TV appearances in a 1994 episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Airplays in the background.
With Amy gaining the ranks at the art gallery, she asks her boss for an introduction to a top Italian restaurant chef who could hire Lino, an authentic Sicilian chef who has mastered Italian cuisine. Amy drives Lino to the interview. During the interview, the chef belittles Lino for his immigrant status and Sicilian ethnicity. Lino returns to Amy’s car, upset over the ordeal.
CULTURE NOT ACCEPTED
For Thanksgiving dinner, Lino, as the chef in the house, cooks the entire holiday meal. But when the family of Amy and Zora arrive looking for Black staples like macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and, of course, turkey with gravy, Lino’s Sicilian-inspired meal is pushed off the table to the windowsill, uneaten. On top of the failed job interview, Lino feels his culture is disappearing.
Over dinner, Amy’s mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, comments that she wants “Brown grandbabies” and asks Lino if his family approves of him cohabitating with Amy. Lino shares that his family hasn’t approved of him in a long time after he left home to attend university then dropped out to become a chef. But, yes, running to America to be with a Black woman who’s not Catholic adds a cherry on top to the disappointment.
After being bummed about the adjustment to his new home, Lino sits up in bed to a surprise bowl of hot grits. That’s what Amy calls the dish, but Lino calls it polenta. The boiled cornmeal is a shared delicacy in Texas and in Sicily; there are similarities between the two places and their two cultures. Earlier, Amy had gone to the restaurant looking for Lino, who had left before his shift ended. She notices his coworkers playing football, better known as soccer by Americans. It motivates Amy to bring Lino to an Italian American bar where he can bond with his work friends and new friends who share the same culture.
In the parking lot of the bar, Amy and Lino get carried by “Try a Little Tenderness” playing in the car. They start dancing behind the vehicle. Lino would listen to the blues while he cooked in Florence.
“In a city, where there is no center, I’m your center, you’re my center,” Amy says. Their dreams may never come true, but they will at least have each other.
Her knee is about to drop when Lino intercepts. He wants his knee to hit the concrete first, but Amy says no. She proposes marriage. Lino says yes. His friends are in the parking lot, too, and cheer for him. With the good news, he calls home. His father picks up the phone. He tells his father that he’s marrying Amy. His father disowns him.
In the book, Tembi and Saro, the inspiration for Lino, get married in New York City in front of a justice of peace due to his visa. Though their real-life proposal may not have been as romantic as the one portrayed on the show, they plan a wedding ceremony and reception in Florence. Amy and Lino do the same.
The first episode of Tembi Locke‘s fictional adaptation of her best-selling memoir From Scratch starts with a Black Texan law school student and a Sicilian chef taking life and love risks in Italy.
Starting in fall 2000, Amy, played by Zoë Saldaña, arrives in Florence for an art program. With a pickup from friend Caroline, played by Kassandra Clementi, Amy is taken to her dorm building where she meets her suitemates. She’s an artist though she’s also a student at Georgetown Law School, where she could become a lawyer like her father and choose a practical career path compared to being an artist. So, she’s taking a risk with her future by indulging in Italian life with art, friends, and a boyfriend whose family owns an art gallery.
One day, Amy and Caroline run into Lino, played by Eugenio Mastrandrea, a chef at a nearby fancy restaurant called Ristorante Vigna Vecchia. Amy points out Lino’s black pointed toe boots as an interesting fashion choice. As Amy struggles with her Italian, Lino laughs and lets her know he knows English.
They later go on a solo walk after a night at the bar where Caroline works. Lino tells Amy he is fluent in English from his time when he studied translation at university. He disappointed his father with his decision to leave his home in Sicily and abandon farming his family’s land. He also abandoned his university studies to become a chef.
Amy is doing the same thing, sort of. When she calls her older sister Zora, played by Till star Danielle Deadwyler, back in Houston where their family is having a barbecue, their father refuses to talk to Amy over her decision to delay her return to Georgetown Law in favor of an art program in Florence.
The look
Lino soon brings Amy a bike that he “finds,” so she won’t have to ride the bus to her program. He then invites her to Vigna Vecchia. She says she may bring the guy she’s dating, and Lino says he is welcomed as well.
That night, Amy brings her two suitemates instead to Vigna Vecchia. The moment she pulls her chair out to sit at the table conveniently facing the kitchen, Amy locks eyes with Lino. Then Amy proceeds with her suitemates to eat extravagant samples of the finest Italian food described in the book as “heaping plates of strozzapreti with braised red radicchio in a mascarpone sauce; fusilli in a fire-roasted bell pepper sauce; gnocchi with gorgonzola in a white martini reduction with shaved aged parmigiano.”
The book goes on to tell the true story between author Tembi Locke and her real-life love, Saro, who was a Sicilian chef working in Florence. This meal sealed their fate.
“I began to see that Saro was speaking directly to me, each dish an edible love letter: succulent, bold. By the third and fourth courses, I accepted that this chef who wore elf boots was making love to me, and we hadn’t even so much as kissed.”
Image: Netflix
Though the limited series is more of a fictional portrait, Tembi said in a recent interview with her sister and showrunner Attica Locke that the moment the characters Amy and Lino connect in the restaurant is what happened in her love story as well, and that that moment ignites the story.
“In Florence and that first time I go to Acqua al 2, which was my late husband Saro’s restaurant, and he cooks me a meal. You cannot have a series called ‘From Scratch’ without that moment,” Tembi said.
“First Tastes” is not only the name of the episode but also the first chapter of the book, where the precise moment they realize that a relationship may blossom from a delicious meal is described as below:
“From my place at center stage, I could see Saro moving like a wizard behind a scrim of sizzling heat, orchestrating the clamorous clanging of pots; setting the pace and unfurling magic onto plates from Acqua al 2’s narrow, searingly hot kitchen. At first glance, the kitchen looked like Aladdin’s cave. There was Saro in a white T-shirt, floor-length apron, white clogs, and red bandanna with James Brown hollering out, ‘This is a man’s world’ from a boom box in the background. Saro caught my eye, smiled, and signaled that he would be out later to say hello.”
Back to the TV series, which shows Amy running off with her pseudo-boyfriend after saying goodbye to Lino. Even after a meal and a spark, Amy can’t fall for a chef when her other romantic option has a connection to art.
African roots
On that walk where Amy and Lino converse about their lives, Lino first pronounces Amy’s name as “ah-mee,” which involves “love” in Italian related to amore. Amy shakes her head no, as she pronounces her name the American way and says it’s short for Amashé, which she tells Lino means “beautiful one” in the South African Zulu language.
Amy later calls Zora, who has moved from Houston to Los Angeles to achieve her dreams while starting out as a teacher. But then their mother Lynn, played by Kellita Smith, gets on the phone. She’s staying with Zora until she embarks on an ashram in Topanga. Lynn gets straight to the point, advising Amy to not “fall for some Disney princess castle shit” in “White-ass Europe.” She reminds Amy about her friend’s daughter who is studying in Kenya as a Fulbright scholar and dating a Ph.D. student in Nairobi. “That is some different shit,” Lynn explains.
The phone call in the series is not much different from the book. The author mentions how her shortened name, Tembi, is for Tembekile, a name bestowed upon her by South African folk singer Miriam Makeba, who was married to former Black Panther Stokely Carmichael. Her parents spent time with both of these figures during their participation in the Pan-African Liberation Movement, a piece missing from the series.
When Tembi talks to her mother further about the situation, she tries to balance her behavior with her mother’s expectations:
“I had been raised to sympathize with the challenges facing people of color across the African diaspora. Why, then, had I come to Italy, the heart of European culture, to study abroad? Why was I not in Kenya, like the daughter of her friend Mary from her former Movement days? Mary’s daughter was on a Fulbright and teaching Kenyan children English as part of her studies at Wellesley. Why was I not more like Mary’s daughter? And why in God’s name was I continuing to hook up with ‘white boys’? She wanted something more for me.”
The spread of parental worry reaches Amy’s father Hershel, played by Keith David, as he arrives in Florence in Texan regalia complete with denim jeans held up by a leather belt with a huge buckle, a pair of cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. He comes with Amy’s stepmother Maxine, played by Judith Scott, to survey Amy’s adventures in Florence. They go to Lino’s restaurant for dinner. Lino believes Amy’s parents are there to meet with him until Amy’s boyfriend enters the scene late. Devastated, Lino backs away into the kitchen.
Hershel tells Amy he doesn’t care for either of her love interests. He also reminds Amy that she shouldn’t fall for any man in a land where the men don’t look like her, the same sentiment her mother shared earlier.
BLACK GIRLs want ROMANCE too
Lino approaches Amy about the mistaken meeting. He confesses his unprecedented feelings for her. She doesn’t say much in response but gives him a notebook he had eyed at a street market. The sentiment that Black girls can’t have fairy-tale romances resonates with Amy, especially when she shares the update on Lino with Zora.
During her art showcase, Amy impresses her teacher, which was the professional goal she had during the program that has been clouded with the possibility of love. Then she sees Lino at the showcase, but he slips out without going up to Amy. She runs after him and asks why he’s leaving. Her teacher calls after her about an opportunity to hobnob with other artists. She tells Lino to meet her at her place later. As she walks away, Amy seems worried that Lino will not come over later. Her carefree time in discovering art and engaging in lust may have cost her true love.
At home, she falls asleep as nighttime falls. Rain starts to fall. The pitter-patter against the windows wakes her. Did Lino come? The moment she looks outside, Lino is looking up at her window. He looks apprehensive. She runs outside in the rain and kisses Lino. A kiss turns into a sleepover. Once they wake in the morning, Lino tells Amy he can cook anywhere in the world. He is willing to uproot his life to be with Amy. That’s when Amy realizes a fairy-tale romance may be in the cards for her after all.
Acne by Laura Chinn tells the story of the television writer/actress’ tumultuous childhood and young adulthood and how her struggles were reflected in a severe case of acne.
Laura Chinn created and starred in the 2019 Pop TV sitcom Florida Girls (think Broad City with Florida Woman adventures) that unfortunately received the ax during the Covid-19 pandemic. The entertainer, who has written for shows like The Mick and Children’s Hospital and acted in shows like Grey’s Anatomy and My Name Is Earl, actually was born in the Los Angeles area where she lived with her “hippie” parents and older brother Max. Though her mother is White and her father is Black, she doesn’t get a sense of her biracial identity until she’s eight-years-old. She never noticed the concept of race since everyone in her house has a different complexion. While Max has brown skin and is often confused for “Mexican or Hawaiian,” Laura has fair skin and dirty blonde curls, so she’s considered outwardly White. Growing up in La Crescenta, she is homeschooled with other kids in her neighborhood. Her childhood is disrupted when her mother announces the family is moving to Clearwater, Florida, the best place for Scientologists like themselves after Los Angeles. Laura, Max, and their mother move to Clearwater while their father stays behind to tie up loose ends.
Laura’s father never moves to Clearwater as Laura navigates her new preteen life in a new place. She starts to notice red pimples erupt on almost every surface of her face. How can this be? She and her family eat a strict healthy diet. Her father blames his genetics for the acne since he says he had the same skin condition as a teen. Scientology tells Laura and her family that internal toxins are clogging her pores. She tries to cleanse the acne that is putting a damper on her social life as she befriends girls like Tori who also have lopsided family situations.
At thirteen years old, Laura is going through the abandonment issues stemming from her father’s decision to not join them in Clearwater. To make matters worse, Max moves back to Los Angeles and stays with their father. There, her brother is diagnosed with a brain tumor. He has to have a surgery that he may not wake up from. Laura and her mother fly from Tampa to Los Angeles to be by Max’s side. He survives the surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but he has a mountain of health issues that keeps Laura and her mother in a hotel as they witness her father parading his barely-adult, chicken nugget-addicted girlfriend Chardonnay around the intensive care unit. Laura returns to Clearwater alone to go back to school. She gets picked up by her mother’s alcoholic boyfriend Joe who drops her off at home with some money for food.
In the short time of raising herself as her parents deal with Max’s cancer diagnosis, Laura is stealing and drinking alcohol with Tori and other friends who are already having sexual relations with boys at school. Laura’s acne is still on a volcanic level as she uses makeup to cake up her face and go on living her unsupervised life. Then Max’s cancer progresses in other parts of his brain, so the family who again tap into their Scientologist teachings to find alternative healing methods decide to move to Tijuana for a form of chemotherapy not approved in the U.S. Laura drops out of the ninth grade to join her family in Mexico.
After realizing she’s better off finishing her education rather than helping Max who has their mother as a caregiver, Laura moves back to Clearwater to finish her freshman year. This time, Joe moves in, but Laura is still raising herself de facto. Due to the miracle of Accutane, teenage antics progress like her losing her virginity.
Accutane had healed my face, neck, chest, and back; it seemed like a wonder pill until, like with all pills, the side effects kicked in. First it was dry skin, then peeling skin, then every day I would shed my entire face like a snake. My lips were painfully cracked and bloody, so for the third time in my life, I didn’t smile for months. Then my vision started to get weird.
Her quick-fix cure makes her think she has cancer like her brother, whose diagnosis came from blurry vision, but she doesn’t. She develops suicidal thoughts while on the medication and while watching her friends find boyfriends she can’t seem to attract. She’s realizing her neighborhood is full of dysfunctional people, including the woman next door who burns her house down to cover up her husband’s murder, as her own mother and brother return to Clearwater unchanged by the failed treatment in Mexico. Laura has to put aside her acne and adolescence to help her mother care for her dying brother, but she still finds herself caring more about what her friends are doing and how her skin is doing.
The older she gets, the more she sees being a high school dropout is not enough. Her father agrees and invites her to live with her half-sister and her niece in Woodland Hills, a section of Los Angeles. Laura finally feels like she’s being supervised but again she can’t help but think what’s going on in her Clearwater social circle. She eventually moves back to Clearwater. Then she gets her GED and tells everyone she’s going to be a famous actress in Hollywood, so back to Los Angeles she goes. But she breaks her arm, so that means back to Clearwater. Despite what’s going on with her family and friends and her face, she has a knack for acting that slips behind the pages.
Once she permanently stays in Los Angeles, makeup artists on sets complain about her acne. Thanks to her father, she heads to the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre to undergo a rehab experience to clear up her acne. She feels imprisoned by her acne. It’s not until she realizes all the physical and metaphorical losses she has experienced over the years had somehow manifested into an extreme case of acne.
Now I forgive with a deep intensity and a passion. I take all the money, effort, and time I was putting toward microdermabrasion, facials, and benzoyl peroxide and I put it all toward learning how to forgive. I honestly wish I could bottle forgiveness and sell it; I’d put Proactiv out of business in a week.
If you ever watched Florida Girls, you will see the comedic messiness there in the pages of Laura’s memoir except her real-life version of events seem more depressing as she details her life as a teen practically unmonitored because of her brother’s unthinkable disease. Her friends experiment and indulge in drugs and sex at a very young age that the peer pressures stunt their growth. The conflict of being a selfish teenager while having to care for her family is deeply realized since most teen girls would be the same way with wanting to focus on boys and controlling their acne to avoid what’s going on at home.
We see Laura’s mother as the main caregiver for Max despite her alcoholic boyfriend turned husband in the house and her ex-husband unable to cope with his son slipping away. Laura helps as much as she can, especially when her brother’s health deteriorates to the point he is blind, deaf, and immobile. It’s heartbreaking to see the transition of her athletic, skateboard-loving brother becoming a very sick young adult who can’t take care of himself. With her life divided between two places that can be difficult to survive in, Laura sees more tragedy within her family and her friend group as she tries to establish herself in Hollywood.
Overall, the memoir connects the dots on a common skin condition that has been relegated to teenage hormonal activity. The author spends her lifetime digging deeper for the reason why her face is covered in pimples on top of pimples, quickly recognizing that her friends who are the same age as her are not dealing with the exact issue but they do have their own issues. It takes years for her to classify acne as her visible issue as she overcomes abandonment and loneliness growing up in an interracial, Scientologist, bicoastal, divorced family. Her love for acting, even in the book, is weaved in and out because her environment is overwhelming her. It’s impressive that she, like many people who had announced they were heading to Hollywood to be a big star, actually overcame the obstacles to achieve her dream that’s still in incubation.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy is an eye-opening memoir examining the abuse the Nickelodeon star said she endured from the mother who forced her into Hollywood.
Jennette McCurdy starred in the Nickelodeon series iCarly (currently in reboot mode on Paramount+ without her) for five seasons from 2007-2012 as Sam Puckett, the supportive, food-loving friend of Miranda Cosgrove’s Carly whose internet show is a viral success. She even scored a spin-off with fellow Nickelodeon star Ariana Grande called Sam & Cat that only lasted a season from 2013-2014 with Ariana being on the brink of pop stardom. Despite finding herself famous at a young age, Jennette never wanted it.
Acting in Hollywood is her mother’s dream. The McCurdys live in Garden Grove, an hour and a half away from the entertainment epicenter in nearby Orange County, but they’re living the low-income life in Jennette’s father’s family home with Jennette, her mother Debra, sometimes her father, her mother’s parents, and her three brothers. By the time Jennette is two years old, Debra is battling breast cancer. As the family copes with the grim diagnosis, they start going back to church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints becomes the sanctuary Jennette connects with. Now that they’re practicing Mormons again, the family feels blessed when Debra goes into remission. But her mother is still not happy, especially with Jennette’s father who seems unable to provide what they need. Frustrated, Debra would complain that her parents wouldn’t let her go to Hollywood, again a short distance away. Then one day six-year-old Jennette says she’ll go to Hollywood for her mother. She knows this will make her mother happy.
They go on casting calls, where Debra is already upset that the untrained Jennette isn’t getting speaking roles right away. Like most actors, Jennette is starting out in the background. She transitions to higher-level background work when she appears gloomy in a film’s photo shoot; that’s what the director wanted from another child actor who couldn’t look as gloomy as Jennette. By this time, Jennette has her gloominess down pat as she feels too old for her overbearing mother to be going to the bathroom with her to clean her up and showering with her.
To help her stay small for child acting roles, her mother tells her about “calorie restriction” and how she can eat 1,000 calories a day or less. Together, mother and daughter are barely eating full meals. At eleven, Jennette starts losing weight at a rapid pace. A casting director warns her mother that Jennette may have an eating disorder. But her mother waves the concern off. Even Jennette’s doctor advises her mother to help Jennette with her eating issues. Again, her mother ignores the advice.
After a series of TV and film appearances, Jennette scores her first leading role as Sam Puckett in iCarly. The pilot episode airs when she’s fifteen years old. Right away, her mother is discouraging a friendship between Jennette and Miranda, the show’s star who already made a name for herself on the Nickelodeon sitcom Drake & Josh, because she sees Miranda as troublesome, accusing her of not believing in God. Jennette feels conflicted about wanting to be friends with her co-star and being a good Mormon daughter. It’s like the two versions of her can’t coexist. She befriends Miranda anyway through secret AOL instant messages after spending days on set with her.
As the show grows in popularity, the more famous Jennette becomes. That translates to more opportunities for the rising teen star like heading to Nashville for a country music recording contract that doesn’t last, being introduced to alcohol by iCarly’s creator Dan Schneider who is unnamed but was investigated for similar on-set abuse allegations last year, and running off with a thirty-something show producer who guilts her for him breaking up with his girlfriend of five years. Jennette’s quick introduction to adulthood forces her mother to disown her. Her mother again is battling breast cancer and looks for a way to edge Jennette out of stardom due to her bad behavior by trying to steal her mostly tween fanbase.
The book starts with Jennette whispering to her unconscious dying mother that she finally reached their goal weight of eighty-nine pounds. By this time, the anorexia and bulimia has ravaged Jennette’s body to the point she doesn’t know how to eat and enjoy a meal. The “calorie restriction” her mother taught her to keep up with Hollywood standards still has a hold on her, so much so that boyfriends encourage her to seek therapy in order to establish healthy relationships. In therapy, she learns about how abusive her mother was by not only teaching her dangerous eating habits but controlling her every move in order for her to be a success in Hollywood. Even after Debra’s death in 2013, Jennette learns that her mother hid a secret that forces her on another journey. What may have been out of love was toxic, so toxic that Jennette realizes she never knew who she really was, just the version of her that wanted to make her mother happy.
The comedic yet heart-wrenching title of the memoir helps normalize the mother-daughter relationship that isn’t as rosy as a lot of portrayals in the media. We see more stories where mothers dote on their daughters, and daughters call their mothers their heroines. But for many daughters, their mothers push their ideas of perfection, especially about their bodies, onto their daughters that creates self-loathing that morphs into mental illness. In the author’s case, her mother’s constant critiques on her body and her acting skills forced her into a downward spiral of eating disorders.
The mothers with their ideas of perfection usually feel they can’t be as perfect as they want to be, so their daughters have to be that perfect. We see Jennette’s mother become disappointed about her life path, feeling she was unable to take on Hollywood herself because her mother told her not to. Jennette details the frustration of dealing with her mother’s mother after her mother dies. The drama-queen antics seem hereditary when her grandmother is upset that Jennette wants to quit acting and undo financial decisions that no longer serve her as a former actor. The generational trauma of these women not feeling able to fulfill their dreams falls onto Jennette as she realizes she never had a chance to figure out her own dreams. Her formative years are gone; they had been spent on making Debra’s dreams come true as Debra read Woman’s World magazines in on-set trailers and networked with other celebrity momagers like Barbara Cameron, the mother of Full House star Candace Cameron Bure and Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, who becomes Jennette’s onetime agent.
Overall, this memoir explores the complex ties between a daughter and her mother with the backdrop of Hollyweird contributing to their dysfunctional relationship. It’s also a memoir where the author has come to terms with her feelings about her mother, hence the controversial title that should be seen as honest. In abusive relationships, once the abuser is gone, then the person who was abused can heal. This book, which was born out of the author’s one-woman shows, is about the healing process of self-discovery.
Lola Tung as Belly in 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'
Best-selling young adult novelist Jenny Han has another series in the book-to-TV limelight. After finding success on Netflix with the three film adaptations of her To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series, she now has her first YA series The Summer I Turned Pretty getting the screen treatment with its recent premiere on Amazon Prime Video.
Not new to advocacy for having more Asian and Asian American stories represented in books, Jenny spoke about the issue on her press tour while a mention made an appearance on the new TV show.
On CBS Mornings this week, anchor Gayle King asked if Jenny was hurt when she wasn’t able to sell her early works featuring an Asian character. Jenny says her feelings weren’t hurt “because it was so matter-of-fact.”
To be able to sell her first YA novel, she made her main character Belly Conklin, played by Lola Tung onscreen, appear White.
Jenny Han in ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ (Peter Taylor/Prime Video)
“I had tried to sell a book with an Asian main character before this one, and people weren’t really interested in it,” says Jenny, who’s also the executive producer of the show. “The thing I would hear is we already have a book with an Asian. I thought with The Summer I Turned Pretty, it was a story I hoped would kind of have an effervescence to it that people can lock onto. After that, I wrote To All the Boys, and I was able to write my own ticket once I had garnered trust from an audience that might not pick up a book with a cover with someone who didn’t look like them.”
The character of Belly became half-Asian, half-White, and is now depicted as biracial on the updated media tie-in cover issued by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
To All the BoysI’ve Loved Before was the first best-seller to have an Asian girl on the cover, according to the author. The fight for representation even spilled onto the choice to have her headshot on the back cover.
“Even with my first book, it was important to me to put a picture on the back of it because at first they were like, ‘Hmm, we don’t really need it.’ It wasn’t really done at the time,” she says. “I want other young Asian women to see that and think it’s possible.”
The Summer I Turned Pretty follows Isabel “Belly” Conklin who’s on the verge of turning 16 when she heads off to Cousins Beach in Massachusetts with her mother and older brother for another summer with the Fishers, her mother’s best friend and two sons.
The foursome who grew up together every summer are now teenagers, and Belly feels the energy shift between her and the oldest Fisher son Conrad, played by Christopher Briney, and the younger Fisher son Jeremiah, played by Gavin Casalegno. Belly always had a crush on Conrad when she was considered too young and nerdy. Now that she’s blossoming into womanhood, heightened by a debutante ball, she becomes entangled in a love triangle that stretches beyond her and the two brothers.
In one scene in the fourth episode “Summer Heat,” after a conflict reaches a fever pitch in the Fisher summer home, Belly’s author mother, Laurel, played by Jackie Chung, heads to a bar to cool off. There, she sees the local author she’s been competing with in the beach town’s bookstore. Once they start chatting, the state of their careers comes up.
“When we went out with my first novel, everyone said, ‘Uhhh, there is no market for a book about a Filipino main character, and now it’s all they want from me,” says author Cleveland, played by Alfredo Narciso, about his treatment in the beginning of his fictional publishing career.
The show also stars Rachel Blanchard as Susannah Fisher, the mother of Conrad and Jeremiah. Rachel starred as the ’90s TV version of Cher Horowitz, the main character of Clueless loosely based on Jane Austen’s classic Emma.
The second season of the series has already received the green light for production.
*Spoilers ahead! Watch the series’ second season on HBO Max*
The Good Place star William Jackson Harper leads the HBO Max series Love Life as a Black editor in a White-dominated publishing world who evolves his approach to diversifying the field.
The first season of the series starred Anna Kendrick as an art dealer stumbling through relationships. In this new iteration, we meet Harper’s character Marcus Watkins, who is also stumbling through relationships with the show emphasizing race and culture in his romantic and career choices via pitch-perfect narration by Keith David.
Marcus Watkins in the beginning of the series is married to Emily, played by Maya Kazan, but he’s starting to feel she doesn’t understand him as a Black man in America since she’s White. He makes this realization after meeting Mia Hines, played by Jessica Williams, at Anna Kendrick’s character Darby’s wedding reception at a bar. Marcus and Mia hit it off, though he’s married and she’s in a relationship with who we soon learn is no other than basketballer Amar’e Stoudemire playing himself. Marcus’ emotional affair is discovered by Emily via iPad messages, and they get a divorce. Marcus blames Mia for the divorce, which of course starts a fight that separates them. They reunite after a few relationships, then another mishap happens in their budding love that forces them to separate.
In the end, they finally get together and stay together with a marriage and baby. As an editor, Marcus struggles to get Black voices heard through the book projects he picks up because his publisher, the fictional Sutton Court Publishing, and boss Josh, played by Steven Boyer, are not supportive of his vision. After Marcus quits his job, Mia convinces him to pursue his own novel. He becomes a full-time author and finishes his novel within two years. And they live happily ever after.
Uplifting Black authors
The first episode “Mia Hines” starts off with Marcus poking fun at his new client, a social media influencer who wants to add an insane amount of words in a subtitle of an instructional book. He wants to take on more serious projects, like an Afrofuturism manuscript he found from a Black grad student at Columbia University.
Josh asks about an update on the social media influencer’s book, and Marcus pipes up about the Afrofuturism book. Josh isn’t interested because the sales projections on that type of book is unpredictable while the social media influencer’s book will become an instant best-seller with her built-in audience.
We see Marcus fighting through the frustration of trying to push more works by authors of color. He decides to invite student-author Trae, played by Jordan Rock, into his office. With Marcus’ notes, Trae is not having it. After ridiculing Marcus’ posters of Black authors from Toni Morrison with cigarette in hand to James Baldwin with cigarette in hand, Trae calls Marcus a “safe, nonthreatening” Black editor voicing the opinions of a White editor. Marcus argues no publisher would take on the thousand-page manuscript. They agree to disagree.
It’s not until the season finale “Epilogue,” Marcus reunites with Trae to get feedback on his novel. Trae, who appears to have sold his book, tells him that Marcus’ Black character trying to maneuver through the White publishing world lacks personality. Marcus takes the note, and it motivates him to improve the book that eventually sells to a publisher. After not seeing eye to eye, they become beta reader brothers.
Celebrating a legend
Marcus visits his University of Michigan professor parents in episode “Destiny Mathis.” His distant father Kirby, played by John Earl Jelks, and mother Donna, played by Fresh Prince of Bel-Air “first Aunt Viv” Janet Hubert, seem to be disappointed that Marcus married Emily too soon out of college and now is divorced. Marcus feels like his happily married parents who are celebrating 35 years together don’t understand the complexities of his modern-day relationships.
In episode “Becca Evans,” Marcus is given an invitation to The Paris Review dinner from Josh as a consolation prize of sorts for receiving a promotion without a raise. The dinner honors poetry legend Nikki Giovanni. It’s the perfect way to lure his father to Manhattan from Ann Arbor for a night of bonding out on the town with their favorite poet.
The fact that the show writers and HBO managed to book the legend and have her on TV is amazing in itself. At 78 years old, Nikki Giovanni takes the stage as the living legend she is, reciting “Autumn Poems.”
the heat you left with me last night still smolders the wind catches your scent and refreshes my senses
I am a leaf falling from your tree upon which I was impaled
Nikki Giovanni, “Autumn Poems”
Taking a stand
The season finale “Epilogue” makes several time jumps, starting with New Years’ Day 2020 to March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold of society. As Marcus adjusts to working on his laptop from his couch, he realizes his live-in fling is not taking precautions seriously and breaks up with her. But as soon as he grows accustomed to his stay-at-home routine, the murder of George Floyd forces him to examine his role in society as a Black man.
Due to the pandemic, his job furloughs almost the entire staff, leaving Marcus the only employee of color. Via videoconferencing, Josh asks Marcus to review Sutton Court’s message on George Floyd and its commitment to diversity and inclusion. As much as Marcus had to fight to bring on authors of color that he still wasn’t able to bring on, the ask is too much. And Marcus demanded a proper promotion with a salary bump and didn’t get an answer. The missteps spark an expletive-laden explosion of how Sutton Court fails to have any commitment to diversity and inclusion whatsoever. Marcus quits on the spot by slamming his laptop screen down.
He soon reunites with Mia, who texts him out of the blue. They meet up masked up and commit to give their relationship another try. Then there’s marriage, a baby carriage, and the book Marcus always wanted to write.
The series packs in some Black Hollywood heavy-hitters like Blair Underwood and Kimberly Elise, both playing Mia Hines’ parents. Every episode is named after a person, mostly the woman Marcus is seeing, but under the romantic stumbling is a character of color also looking for his footing in the current publishing landscape.
Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com
Misfits by Michaela Coel is a smart quick read where the actress, screenwriter, and producer narrates her rise in entertainment by recognizing the people she classifies as misfits while also noticing how moths always seem to make an appearance on her journey.
How many other potential artists with stories we want and need have we lost for the sake of financial profit; have we lost to thoughtless education systems, thoughtless nurturing, thoughtlessness? Why are we platforming misfits, heralding them as newly rich successes while they balance on creaking ladders with little chance of social mobility? I can’t help usher them into this house if there are doors within it they can’t open.
The hourlong book starts with Michaela ready to kill a moth interrupting an informal Stranger Things screening in her flat with her friends. Instinctively, she sprays moth killer. Once her friends gag at the odor, she realizes her sense of smell is gone. That same year in 2018, she’s invited to the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival where she not only vocalizes her story but analyzes the elements that propelled her to unexpected stardom.
The author intersects lepidopterology throughout the key moments that contribute to her career in entertainment from dropping out of college a few times to taking a chance on a virtually White theater school, then writing her own play and performing it, and seeing that play become her first TV show, Chewing Gum.
The term “misfit” can be cross-generational and crosses concepts of gender or culture, simply by a desire for transparency, a desire to see another’s point of view. Misfits who visibly fit in will sometimes find themselves merging with the mainstream, for a feeling of safety.
Race and class define the story. The daughter of an immigrant single mother, Michaela attends a youth theater for free. She’s the only Black girl there. As an adult, the lack of diversity remains the same at her theater school. But when she writes the play that becomes the U.K. Netflix series Chewing Gum, she realizes the pattern continues on the industry level where she had to make sure the majority Black cast received the same treatment as the White actors.
During that show, she admits her business dealings weren’t clear to her. She eventually declines that newsworthy million-dollar offer from Netflix for her next show that evolves into HBO’s I May Destroy You. While working long hours on her second show, a night out for a break becomes the impetus for the future award-winning series as she is accosted by a flashback that makes her realize she had been raped. It’s then she finds herself leaning on the misfits she met inside and outside the industry to help her in the healing process and the storytelling process.
Overall, the personal manifesto highlights the author’s most meaningful memories describing where she is now and uses interesting symbolism from misfits to moths. Because of the length and substance, it’s a good choice for readers trying to stick to their annual reading goals or looking for something short and sweet.
Spoiler alert: The post below reveals storylines from the seventh season of Younger.
Literary industry cable series Younger wrapped up a successful seven seasons this summer. Though racial and ethnic diversity took a backseat to the storylines, the show still put diversity and inclusion in the forefront of an industry struggling to fulfill its promises.
Created by Sex and the City and Beverly Hills 90210 visionary Darren Star, Younger follows a 40-something White woman named Liza Miller, played by Broadway veteran Sutton Foster, who knocks her age down to 26 to get her foot back into the door of the publishing industry after raising her daughter and divorcing her husband. Based on Pamela Redmond Satran’s 2005 novel of the same name, the show started on TV Land in 2015 and moved to Paramount+ this year.
The show featured diversity markers, mainly with age and gender, in a fictional publishing scene made to look obscenely glamorous. Recent data from Lee & Low Books finds that the literary industry as a whole is 74% cisgender female, but when it comes to executive leadership positions, the number is down to 60%. On Younger, the main female characters are striving to retain and maintain leadership throughout the series to elevate works by women.
Amplifying younger voices
“Younger” Ep. 603 (Airs 6/26/19)
After lying about her age, Liza earns the coveted job of an editorial assistant at traditional publishing powerhouse Empirical. To make matters more complicated, Liza is paired up with actual 26-year-old Kelsey Peters, played by Hilary Duff, whose ambition oozes to make books more appealing to millennials.
This eventually leads to the two creating an imprint called Millennial, not only multiplying books by Gen Y authors but also taking a focus on female authors in the age group. As they are underestimated by Empirical and the industry at large, Liza and Kelsey build a behemoth of an imprint that in its final season begins suffering from hits by Empirical’s old White male investors.
This motivated the pair to create Inkubator, a spoken word event series featuring promising millennial authors ready to have their work published.
Women supporting women
“Younger” Ep. 501 (Airs 6/5/18)
Helping Liza and Kelsey on their literary adventures and misadventures are editor Diana Trout, known for her brusqueness and over-the-top statement necklaces, who is played by Miriam Shor who did not return for the final season; Lauren Heller, the carefree bisexual social media enthusiast played by Molly Bernard who replaces Diana’s presence in the Empirical office as an assistant; and Maggie Amato, the lesbian artist played by legend Debi Mazar who owns the fabulous loft they all seem to live in at one point in the series.
They become this unbreakable group, along with one man—Liza’s millennial ex, Josh, played by Nico Tortorella, a tattoo artist entrepreneur with a heart of gold. Liza goes back and forth with Josh and Empirical’s editor in chief, Charles Brooks, the well-meaning head honcho who is age-appropriate for Liza played by Peter Hermann. Having sexual relations with the boss while editing his ex-wife’s novel is one of the situations that comes up with the ill-begotten romance between Liza and Charles. This novel leaped offscreen onto our bookshelves as Marriage Vacation reviewed by she lit.
With all the drama mostly involving Liza’s back-and-forth relationships, the girl group feeds on their mistakes with men and women. The girlboss-in-making Kelsey seems to be pick the men who want to compete with her success in one way or another, with one ill-fated relationship leading to a death by scaffolding (very NYC) and an evil twin (very soapy). As Liza and Kelsey lean on Maggie, Lauren, and Diana, they also support female writers with some of the most familiar scenes of the series occurring in the closed office session with a new writer who is revolutionizing the newer subgenres, e.g. sick lit, teen environmentalist memoir, and boomer erotica.
Shelving racial diversity
“Younger” Ep. 612 (Airs 9/04/19)
The show’s cast is all-White, which is normal on TV shows to have an entire cast of the same racial makeup, but it resonates with the real-life publishing industry, unfortunately. The show failed to right this diversity and inclusion oversight with its choice of guest stars in earlier seasons.
Charles Michael Davis, who played Kelsey’s frenemy lover Zane Anders for three seasons, added much-needed melanin as a regular cast member, but he and his character had to depart in the final season due to his commitment to NCIS: New Orleans. As his character left the script, the show featured two writer characters who contributed to Millennial’s next phase.
Dylan Park, played by Yeena Sung, appeared in “The F Word,” the episode that introduces Inkubator. She is a future author with a novel that Kelsey and Liza try to get published through Empirical since Millennial by this time has been absorbed into the publisher thanks to the investors’ wishes. But editor in chief Charles is not interested, so Kelsey and Liza have the novel published by a release of a chapter every week in The Cut. Though an Asian American millennial female author is brought into the storyline, she only makes one appearance, failing to become a substantive character while her book really becomes the character.
The final season then brings in another author of color, Azealia King, played by De’Adre Aziza, a Black woman who has won the National Book Award. She’s so impressive that Charles wants to publish her next book. Her character appears in the last two episodes, almost as if the writer’s room realized they didn’t have enough female authors of color featured throughout the series.
Out of an industry that is 74% cisgender female, publishing is 76% White, according to the Lee and Low Books’ report. Numbers for professionals of color are broken down by 7% Asian descent, 6% Latino/Latina, 5% African descent, and less than 1% Native American and Middle Eastern.
Despite the diversity successes and failures of imagining the cutthroat Manhattan book publishing scene into an addictive summer TV series, the show still gives feel-good vibes and is expertly written with relatable moments. Live or relive the half-hour series on Paramount+ and Hulu.
Women’s fiction author Tia Williams‘ 2016 novel is evolving into a Netflix film amid the Hollywood COVID-19 disruption with the assistance of actress and producer Gabrielle Union.
The Perfect Find follows a 40-year-old single Black fashion magazine editor who’s at odds with her new boss. But when she finds love in the workplace with the videographer half her age, she learns it’s her boss’ son. Gabrielle will star in the Netflix/AGC Studios film as main character Jenna Jones and produce under her company I’ll Have Another, named in conjunction with her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine.
According to Deadline, Niecy Nash and Keith Powers will join the cast with Numa Perrier joining as director. On the film’s IMDb page, it reads Keith will play Eric, the 20-year-old co-worker boo opposite Gabrielle’s character. Tia confirmed on her Instagram Thursday that Niecy will play Darcy, Jenna’s nemesis and Eric’s mother. The script’s head writer is Leigh Davenport, whose recent projects include Lifetime’s Wendy Williams: The Movie and BET’s Boomerang.
In pre-production, the film does not have a release date yet but is expected to be on Netflix.
The book was published by Brown Girls Books following Tia’s 2004 debut chick lit novel The Accidental Diva and 2007’s young adult series It Chicks. Her next novel, Seven Days in June, will be released in June under Grand Central Publishing.
