Another artist has created an online library featuring rare works by Black and Brown authors. Two weeks after indie rapper Noname announced the opening of her book club’s Radical Hood Library, singer and songwriter Solange Knowles’ platform opened the Saint Heron Community Library on Monday.
The library will have a guest curator per season with Rosa Duffy, the founder of Atlanta-based For Keeps Books, handpicking the first round of works. This season’s selections include Audre Lorde’s 1976 poetry collection Coal, Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry collection Children Coming Home, Ntozake Shange’s poetry collection A Daughter’s Geography, Octavia E. Butler’s sci-fi novel Clay’s Ark, and Rita Dove’s story collection Fifth Sunday.
“The digital Library will spark new conversations about the breadth of rich artistic expression and the impact of black identity in creative innovation throughout history,” reads a post on Solange’s Instagram account.
In an interview with Saint Heron Community Library’s editorial manager Shantel Aurora-Pass, Rosa said she took particular interest in elevating the access to books that have become less and less accessible to Black readers.
“When people ask the purpose or mission of the space, it’s true accessibility because all of this stuff has existed for all of these years, it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere,” she said. “But the truth is that it’s either hoarded, or we just don’t know much about it. The folks that know its value sometimes are the ones that are keeping it from the people that it’s made for.”
The library went live via Saint Heron’s website on Oct. 18. As of Oct. 19, all 50 books are unavailable. Books are free to be borrowed by U.S. residents for a maximum of 45 days. Physical books are being sent to borrowers via Worldnet, which will provide shipping and return postage costs, according to Saint Heron’s Instagram.
Earlier this month, Noname announced the opening of Radical Hood Library, a brick and mortar in Los Angeles with a mostly rare collection of books by Black and Brown authors that’s also available for online borrowing through the library catalog app Libib.
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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.
Annual literary festival Books in Bloom on Sunday marked the grand opening of a multifaceted bookstore chain and welcomed a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its main stage.
Based in a mixed-use cultural center called the Merriweather District in the master-planned community of Columbia, Maryland, Books in Bloom has become one of the D.C. metro area’s most well-known progressive book events. In its fifth year, the festival hosted several authors at Color Burst Park throughout the day with The 1619 Project creator and The New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the featured author. Over 150 spectators roamed the park’s grounds to eat, drink, and be bookish.
The festival also highlighted the soft opening of the new location of Busboys and Poets, a popular D.C. bookstore chain known for its added restaurant, bar, café, and venue concept. Dozens lined up at the bookstore-eatery after the festival, where the business had a pop-up stand. Beside its tent was the Howard County mobile library.
With past headliners such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, political journalist April Ryan, and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this year’s headliner Nikole Hannah-Jones was joined by the following authors:
“Two things happened in 1619: the arrival of the White Lion and the beginning of African slavery in the thirteen colonies, but it’s also when the country took its first step towards democracy,” she said. “It’s when the English colonists took a vote on this land for the first time. Democracy and anti-democracy are birthed in the same moment. The idea of freedom and slavery is birthed in the same moment in this country, but we’re not taught that.”
Tweeting under the user name Ida Bae Wells, Nikole also explained why Ida B. Wells is her role model, especially when the newspaper she works for now once called the groundbreaking Black investigative journalist a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress,” also referenced in Nikole’s Twitter bio.
“What Ida B. Wells means to me personally is she was the first example of a Black woman doing what I hoped to do, which shows you a lot about our field, right?” she said. “That I had to go to a woman born right at the Emancipation Proclamation to see a model of a Black investigative reporter who was a woman, who was a feminist, who was a civil rights activist, who was doing the type of reporting that I wanted to see.”
“But also that legacy of lineage matters,” she continued. “To understand that there were badass Black women who were doing things at a time when there was no help that was going to come to protect Ida B. Wells when she was investigating lynchings.”
She added the actions of Black female writers before her sets the tone for her work:
It gives you courage. It gives you strength. It helps you understand what you’re doing, and it gives you humility that you didn’t create this. There are a lot of folks who came before you. There are a lot of folks who had to sacrifice and suffer for you to do the work that you do and that, to me, gives the motivation for the work that I’m trying to do because I have to repay this debt that I owe.
Besides the literary content, the park’s atmosphere was filled with Instagrammable features, including a welcome arch made from books, light-studded signs, and pumpkin-and-hay stacks, splashed with the festival’s lavender-hued branding. A chalkboard requested attendees write down what they’re reading. The district also had restaurants with outside seating like Dok Khao Thai Eatery, The Charmery, Clove & Cardamom, and Cured and 18th & 21st.
The event was free with tickets available on Eventbrite. Almost all attendees followed the mask mandate. Street and garage parking around the Merriweather District was free for the festival.
The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna is a heavy fantasy young adult novel that forces the main character to face her blood, sweat, and tears for a war she’s not sure she should be fighting in.
Deka lives in the village of Irfut inside a kingdom called Otera with her sickly father as she lost her mother recently to red pox. While taking care of her father and the household, she is apprehensive about the forthcoming Ritual of Purity that expels girls who bleed gold instead of red from society. At the ceremony, Deka’s worst nightmare comes true: she is impure. She is thrown into a dungeon where she is killed several times. But she doesn’t die. She falls into a gilded sleep until she awakes repaired without a scar in sight. Her immortality attracts a woman Deka dubs as White Hands, who whisks Deka away with another girl named Britta to a training ground where other young women, known as alaki, who also bled impure are trained to fight flying demons known as deathshrieks. Accepting this journey as her destiny, she trains as hard as she can to fight the deathshrieks, who are known to destroy whole villages, killing everyone in sight. The better the fighter Deka becomes, the more she questions how she became a fighter. When one of her new sisters in training dies in battle, she promises to avenge the killing. But she starts wondering if the deathshrieks are as dangerous as she has been taught to believe.
The storyline emphasizes the impurity girls can be accused of, particularly around the time they begin menstruating. The girls are declared not only discardable but also devilish, another accusation real-life girls face rooted in the story of Eve. Throughout the book, Deka still prays to her god, Oyomo, despite the cards she has been dealt. Others around her tell her she shouldn’t pray because she has been cursed, but she upholds her religious faith.
Comprehending why war is taking place is also a theme ripped from reality. Deka feels saved by White Hands to become a warrior for the king to fight deathshrieks. But Deka can communicate with the deathshrieks and wonders if they are the true enemies. She tries to piece together the origins of the war and why she and the other alaki have been chosen to be the warriors other than their immortality.
With Deka scared about the purity ceremony, she foresees the worst-case scenario is her destiny. Then arriving at the training grounds seems to be her final destiny as a warrior forever bound to killing deathshrieks, but the more she evolves, the more she is realizing her destiny goes beyond what feels like servitude to the kingdom.
As fantasy YA novels continue to overpower the entire kidlit genre, there are still tropes in this book. The girls training together must become sisters in the fight, for example, like many characters before them with finding family along the journey especially when their biological families have disappeared. A furry feline creature arrives on the scene that only knows Deka, and of course, it’s a shape-shifter. The story is so jam-packed with tension that the world-building takes a hit. It sounds like they’re in Africa, but the girls come from all over the world evidenced by their ethnic names that may sound like they’re from Europe or Asia or Africa. More description of the geography would have helped boost the imagination of their location; the map at the beginning of the book shows the kingdom, but the character names steeped in real cultures contradict the map of an imaginary region.
Overall, the book has strong feminist yet disturbing elements of showing girls being disrespected and disregarded because of who they are. There is no ceremony on testing boys’ blood, but these girls are subjected to this sexist tradition that defines their futures that are chosen by men and a patriarchal society. It reflects the minor and major events affecting girls around the world like those who cannot seek an education. Like a lot of other fantasy novels threading real-world themes in make-believe lands, this novel has a lot of scary familiarity in its storyline.
Fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen wants people to feel confident in their clothes.
Her self-help book, Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level published by Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown Spark imprint, came out the same time the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of society and forced us to stay home. That means we exchanged our business attire for loose-fitting athleisure to feel comfortable in our living space-turned-workspace. But now that many of us are returning to the office amid delta variant fears or expecting to return eventually, her fashion psychology curriculum can be applied to the current era.
Sweatsuit to Pantsuit
During the pandemic, many of us may have been suffering from repetitious wardrobe complex, which is what the author defines as wearing the same clothes—or versions of the same clothes—over and over again. That means our tie-dye sweatsuits and other forms of athleisure that we zhooshed up as much as we could for the Zoom calls have kept us in a loop.
Staying at home subtracted the decision fatigue many of us dealt with when it came to selecting five office-friendly outfits for five workdays. Dawnn Karen tells readers to avoid this fatigue when you’re faced with too many options for what to wear and buy, which in turn makes you feel often overwhelmed and paralyzed in making decisions you later regret. Buyer’s remorse, anyone? To get ready for the physical office, she suggests taking the time to sense any discomfort with an outfit that you probably hadn’t put on since March 2020.
Mood is central to our outfit selection, according to Dawnn Karen’s fashion psychology. Before approaching your closet in the morning or the night before, she advises to practice mood illustration dressing, or meditating briefly by matching your outfit with how you are feeling. Feeling upbeat? Wear that pop of color.
Feeling down? Wear that comfortable skirt. Or take another step to practice mood enhancement dressing, or to choose what you wear to modify your mood for the better. It’s a tactic to wear the most office-appropriate attire that will make you feel the most confident, e.g. the not-so-sky-high heels or the cardigan for the air conditioning, especially if returning to the office after a year and a half and feeling the weight of pressure to return to work.
“When you thoughtfully assess your emotional state and then dress to respect or match it,” she writes. “The goal here is not to transform or challenge yourself with clothes but to embrace, accept, and honor yourself exactly where you are.”
Stressing Over Dressing
For women, fashion situational code switching may have plagued our former workdays, particularly when you had to put on the pantsuit, preferably designer or name brand, to compete in the office when you would rather wear jeans and a nice top. Switching your attire up for the social setting can be stressful and can extend to the hair and makeup routine where you feel you have to wear your hair a certain way or tone down your makeup.
Fashion identification assimilation and fashion incongruence could be two issues reflective of the times. The former is when you use style to fit in with or blend into a cultural or social group, the author writes, when the latter is when your ideal dress and perceived dress are incompatible. You may want to wear the comfortable clothes that you’ve been wearing for months at home, but it might break the workplace dress code. Then you might think those black leggings you wore at home can be mistaken for black slacks in the office, but that is most likely a no-go. More employees are expecting rules on lax office wear post-pandemic, business insiders forecast, while some employees may return to an unchanged model.
A focal accessory can bring comfort, the author describes as an item that holds psychological value and may be worn repeatedly. It can be worn with your work and outside-of-work outfits. She advises to start small such as with a family heirloom necklace pendant, which can bring the warmth of protection in spirit.
Comfortable in Your Skin Again
“In my experience, the best way to get off the retail therapy treadmill and break the cycle of buying, regretting, then buying some more is mindfulness,” Dawnn Karen writes in the chapter she named “The Science Behind Shopping.”
Need new threads? This book can help you figure out your wardrobe upon emerging from our forced stay-at-home lives. More Americans are purging their closets for multiple reasons from expired trends to weight gain, according to the Associated Press, as we slowly return to normal.
Originally released under an indie publisher, best-selling author Tia Williams’ novel The Perfect Find is being re-released via Grand Central Publishing.
The top publisher released Tia’s latest novel Seven Days in June this summer. The book made The New York Times Best Sellers list and became Reese’s Book Club’s June selection.
Published in 2016, The Perfect Find came out under Brown Girls Books managed by authors ReShonda Tate Billingsley and Victoria Christopher Murray. Victoria currently has a NY Times best-seller out now called The Personal Librarian co-authored by Marie Benedict. On its website, the publisher says it’s not currently accepting submissions.
Tia’s book will be turned into an upcoming Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union, Gina Torres, La La Anthony, and Aisha Hinds. Announcing production wrapped last month on Instagram, Gabrielle also serves as a producer as she starts her own book tour for her second memoir You Got Anything Stronger? this month. In her Instagram post on Wednesday, Tia revealed the film is expected to be available for streaming next spring.
The new version of The Perfect Find will be on bookshelves Sept. 14, according to the author’s post.
A HarperCollins Publishers imprint is breathing new life into an independent book that became a hit via word of mouth.
Jayne Allen calls her book, Black Girls Must Die Exhausted, “chocolate chick lit with a conscience.” Originally published in 2018 with indie publisher Quality Black Books, the book is now under the Harper Perennial umbrella with a new release today.
The book became an internet sensation especially among Black female readers and their book clubs.
“I want you to know this story because it is truly our story,” the author wrote in an Instagram post in February announcing the new edition. She continues her post with adding what she has heard from readers over the years.
Together, we made change happen in the publishing industry and hand-in-hand, we’ll keep the tides of progress rolling in. You took a risk on a little independent project with a funny title. You read in bookclubs, in bathtubs and in bed, on subways and on sofas. You have written hundreds of reviews and spread the word through gorgeous posts and generous words. You gave this life.
Black Girls Must Die Exhausted revolves around a 30-something Black female TV reporter in Los Angeles struggling with her dating life while yearning for a baby as her biological clock ticks. She realizes her friends are in the same boat. The she lit book review is here from the original publishing. The book may be different with the new publisher.
The former version of the book will be retired as Harper Perennial plans to release the next two books in the series in 2022, according to the author.
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams follows two best-selling authors who reunite on the New York literati circuit years after a high school fling that left them scarred. It’s a sophisticated romance still accompanied by a happily ever after.
Manhattanite single mom Eva Mercy is a former best-selling novelist whose Black vampire romance series à la Twilight still excites fans via the interwebs. By chance, an author drops out of a panel event, and Eva gets the last-minute invitation to fill the spot. That’s where she sees fellow, still-successful best-selling novelist Shane Hall, a mysterious intellectual who makes women and men alike swoon. Eva tries not to swoon because it turns out she and Shane went to high school once in D.C. and spent a week of debauchery in a mansion during their senior year. They meet up for a day in New York where the deep-rooted chemistry overtakes them. The day blends into another one and another where they start catching up about what went wrong when they were teenagers. Eva thinks Shane, who was a foster child and drug dealer at the time, abandoned her at her lowest point, but she learns that another force divided them. As they try to rekindle what they had as adults, Eva and Shane must combat their demons to accept the love that was severed so many years ago.
This is Tia Williams’ most complex work yet. Known for centering her novels on Black women in New York working in media, the author adds more layers to Eva’s character and Shane’s character not common in a lot of women’s fiction and romance novels. In adolescence, the main characters are dealing with substance abuse, self-harm, unstable homes, and missing parents. In adulthood, the age-old traumas return with them realizing how reflective their behaviors are when they interact with each other and the kids in their lives like Eva’s Gen Z daughter Audre and Shane’s mentee Ty. The character and storyline complexity blends well with the ubiquitous pop culture references the author loves to add to her novels.
Also, this is the first novel the author makes her main character an author as well when her previous novels’ main characters are beauty and fashion editors like her former day job life. Switching up the career choice also shows more depth with Eva translating her healing process through her books and Shane doing the same with his. Another element of the novel is Eva living with her invisible disability of suffering from debilitating migraines that worsen with barometric pressure. This also reflects the author’s life. She has given this trait to her first novel’s main character from The Accidental Diva, but this time around in Seven Days in June she makes Eva feel the everyday pain and impact and gives Audre the fear of seeing her mother chronically ill. The migraines also contribute to Eva’s writer’s block and how she’s struggling to deliver the 15th book of her famous series that is getting the film treatment with some hiccups along the way.
Overall, this novel is an excellent summer beach read that’s definitely a page-turner the deeper you get into the book. Tia Williams’ last novel from 2016, The Perfect Find, is in production with Gabrielle Union for Netflix. This novel also has silver-screen potential, especially with the book-to-film subplot that brings up diversity and inclusion in Hollywood projects.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton reexamines the trials and tribulations of a fictional 1970s soul rock band fronted by a White British man and an Black American woman who see their rise decline during a racial riot at a major concert. Marked with exquisite detail, the story trips up on telling multiple perspectives to the point it’s difficult to connect with the many characters and their worlds.
Sunny Shelton is a music journalist and the daughter of Jimmy Curtis, a drummer who was fatally beaten during a 1971 concert featuring the top talent from up-and-coming label Rivington Records. What sparked the melee was the conflict between Opal & Nev, an interracial soul rock group, and the Bond Brothers, a Southern White band who brought the Confederate flag on stage. Opal, a Black woman from Detroit who summered in Alabama when she was young, hated that the Bond Brothers had the audacity to bring this oft-perceived offensive symbol of oppression on stage. The history of how the concert went south becomes fascination for Sunny who revisits all the players decades later to write a book about the events that led to her father’s untimely death. And the fact that Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father at the time of the concert blurs the emotions of Sunny’s journalism as she tries to revive a music magazine as editor in chief.
The book is packed with details that the story of Opal & Nev feels authentic. The story focuses on this band, but the story comes full circle with the band’s influence on the deadly concert that becomes part of music history on the level of Woodstock. The details also become problematic where the characters become sidelined by telling their stories to Sunny, who as a narrator fades in the background but reappears toward the end as she pieces who was at fault for her father’s death. The plot is reminiscent to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but in that masterpiece the journalist with the dead father and the Hollywood actress are the only perspectives the reader receives with their stories intertwining at the end as well. In Evelyn Hugo, the characters’ truths flow well with the same story backdrop of a journalist’s interview process highlighting an icon’s journey where in Opal & Nev that technique fails especially with the characters’ truths changing almost every page, so a character’s thought process gets amputated by another character’s thought process.
Opal is supposed to be the main character, but when the story is not told from her point-of-view, it seems like a loss for the reader to really get to know how magical she seems to be. She is presented to us as this badass Black female singer struggling to become a star amid the civil rights movement who has elements of Betty Davis or Tina Turner, overshadowed by a male musician but finds her voice. But her voice is misconstrued when she tries to plot revenge on the Bond Brothers and destroy the Confederate flag at a high-profile concert. This part of the story feels all too real of a Black woman trying to raise awareness about racial insensitivity yet is the scapegoat for the disaster that results from the explosive anger.
Overall, the novel features an extraordinary fictional music saga, but the characters contributing to the story get lost in the shuffle of a pretend journalistic venture. The elaborateness of the fake historical account can be awe-inspiring as well as destructive to the story’s resonance.
Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins explores the relationships between women in two families intertwined by a broken promise that haunts a community over the alleged power of the caul.
Set in Harlem, the novel introduces us first to Laila, a Black woman who seems to have it all in her perfect brownstone where she lives with her perfect husband. But she can’t carry a baby to term, her miscarriages becoming the talk of the town. Then one day, she’s pregnant again but constantly worries about losing the baby. A man at her church named Landon approaches her about the opportunity to make sure her baby will be born alive and full term. Landon, who happens to be Laila’s niece Amara’s godfather, seems to be someone who can be trusted. He offers Laila a piece of caul, a rare layer of skin purported to have protecting powers. Laila ponders about buying the caul for her unborn child when she meets Josephine, a clerk at the convenience store. She sees Josephine get a paper cut and instantly heal with the caul she tries to hide. This magnetizes Laila to Josephine Melancon, who also says she’s had a history of miscarriages. Once Laila decides to buy the caul, Landon says the deal is off. This drives Laila to insanity as she loses her baby.
Laila ends up losing her husband and her home and lives with her sister Denise. Denise’s daughter, Columbia University student Amara, sees her aunt Laila unable to recover from the breakdown. The attention on Laila saves Amara, who is keeping her own pregnancy a secret. When she meets her godfather Landon at the church, Amara falls but rebounds. Landon notices this power and the pregnancy and offers Amara a place to hide out. Amara stays with Landon and his family until she gives birth to a girl named Hallow. Born with a caul, Hallow is raised by Landon and his mistress Josephine and is groomed to continue the profitable Melancon family business of selling caul to wealthy White people and denying caul to the Black people in their community.
Years later, Amara is preparing for a run as district attorney, but what the Melancons did to her family still gnaws at her. Laila’s tragedy becomes her driving force to be a successful lawyer, and she feels she finally found the legal solution with shutting down the Melancons’ caul-selling empire. In the back of her mind, she’s also thinking of the daughter she gave up and wondering what happened to her.
The novel is centered on the folklore of caul and how it would be sold through centuries to people who sought protection from danger. It also blends in family, fertility, race, class, and gentrification, spanning over 20 years in an evolving Harlem. Female-centered families anchor the story with most of the focus on the Melancons with matriarch Maman, oldest daughter Josephine, and youngest daughter Iris, who also lost her mind from having to be cut for her caul to protect anyone who pays for it. Iris’ daughter Helena had an accident as a child making her unfit to donate caul, which makes her an unruly companion to Hallow, who’s considered the perfect caulbearer. Josephine also feels stuck in the business but sees her affair with Landon as a way out. As the Black residents of Harlem see a mysterious family in the brownstone, the Melancons inside are in constant conflict about the business they refuse to share with the community because the community cannot afford the caul services. If one has the remedy, then why not share it with your community? That’s the question that plagues the outside where residents like Laila and Amara have a vendetta against the Melancons.
Overall, the first novel from journalist and nonfiction author Morgan Jerkins is a smooth literary fiction read that takes an element of magical realism and mixes it with the changing times around race and gentrification.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler takes time travel and blends the science fiction concept across race, gender, and DNA with the main character going back to the antebellum South to save an ancestor in order for her to live in the future.
The story starts with Dana, a Black woman in 1976 Pasadena, California, who is in the hospital recovering from the loss of her left arm and waiting for her White husband Kevin to finish with the police. How she loses her arm is a journey that begins on her 26th birthday when she finds herself in 1815 Maryland saving a White boy from drowning. When she asks the boy’s name, she learns it’s Rufus Weylin. The name rings a bell because the boy is her ancestor, the father to one of her foremothers, Hagar who was born in 1831. Dana needs to save him, so he can eventually plant the seed for Hagar with his slave Alice Greenwood to make sure she will exist.
Before she gets in trouble for being a free Black woman in 1970s attire, she finds herself back home to a worried Kevin. She is later summoned again by Rufus where he is burning the curtains in his bedroom. Dana realizes she returns to the past under Rufus’ control when he is in trouble and the only way back home is her own fear. As fear controls the time travel, Dana returns to the past again, but this time Kevin holds on for the ride. Now, she and her husband are stuck in the antebellum South where their interracial relationship is illegal. Kevin tries to find his place as a White man in the prior century by spending time with the slave-owning Weylins while Dana is adjusting to life as a slave and befriending Alice and the other slaves. The inhumanity and cruelty of slavery motivates her to uplift the slaves with her futuristic ideals, but it results in Dana receiving a punishment so severe that it scares her back home—without Kevin. She is determined to return to save her husband and her ancestors to make sure her existence comes into being.
This masterpiece is categorized as science fiction, but it exceeds the genre by having the main character return to the past to save herself instead of traveling to the future to save the world. The story emphasizes the complicated nature of African American ancestry with the slave master being a part of the bloodline and Dana needing Rufus to survive in order for a Black branch of the bloodline to lead to her birth.
There is a dependency between Dana and Rufus as Dana wants to exist while Rufus, who accepts Dana as a time traveler without knowing their shared lineage, also wants to exist subconsciously despite his tendency to fall into life-threatening situations. Dana sees Rufus grow up, and as Rufus becomes a man, he begins seeing Dana in a sexual light, especially with her resemblance to Alice. That development confuses Dana, who wants to keep Rufus happy for her survival and the survival of the slaves on the Weylin plantation.
What also adds another dimension to the story is Dana having a White husband in a time when their marriage is legal but still receives negative attention. Her family and his family were not too happy when they married, so as she navigates her contemporary world in an interracial couple, she finds herself 150 years in the past dependent on Kevin to save them. Also, at home she depends on Kevin, the successful author with his best-selling book giving them the money to buy their new home where Dana begins her time travel. Dana wants to be an author, too, but her dreams take a hit in boosting Kevin’s career. For survival in both worlds, Dana has to work with her husband and her forefather because the color of her skin impedes what she can do.
The more Dana drops into the early 1800s, the more she realizes she can’t present herself as a free Black woman on a plantation. She gets closer to her other ancestor, Alice, who also needs assistance especially as a slave, but their connection reaches the frustrated friendship level since Alice knows she can’t trust Dana with her disappearing acts and her tendency to stand by Rufus, Alice’s owner and rapist. Dana gets complaints from other slaves for wanting to be White and using that alleged privilege to her advantage.
The empathy fight Dana struggles with in having Rufus’ back when he follows the slavery law of the land becomes overwhelming. Every time she returns home to 1976 California, she has physical and emotional bruises and scars trying to make sense of her surroundings that are over a century and thousands of miles apart.
Overall, Kindred packs a multitude of elements into a novel that has a Black female character straddling two worlds in two different time periods and facing racism for her choices to survive in a world not set up in her favor.
Well-Read Black Girl is an anthology by Black female writers who discuss how they became writers, but while some stories strike a chord, others lack depth.
Between the stories, the anthology has lists of written works by Black women to check out. It’s a valuable resource for a to-be-read list. The writers themselves usually mention a work that changed their life and directed them to writing. Jesmyn Ward discusses the unexpected Black girl magic within Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth by E.L. Konigsburg. Dhonielle Clayton credits Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair with making her realize her sexuality. Zinzi Clemmons discovers how close she grew up next to the Brooklyn brownstones highlighted in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mahogany L. Browne compares the girls in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to the ones she grew up with in Northern California and how they all felt invisible as Black girls.
While some essays mostly focus on one experience and one book, others broaden their journey. Rebecca Walker talks about being Alice Walker’s daughter and how hanging out with Black female writing dynamos informed her future career. Gabourey Sidibe writes about her mother’s disappointment in having a daughter and how that motivated her to live her best life. Renee Watson tells the story of how she became a Rose Festival Princess in Portland despite being a big Black girl expected to lose and how Lucille Clifton’s poetry later moved her to accept her body.
The anthology gives insight to what inspires some of the top Black female writers, but it comes off as a collection meant for a younger audience. The theme of how you became a writer or what it means to be a Black writer also simplifies the essays with several mentioning well-known books as inspiration with similar reasoning. Marita Golden writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s impact on her career, particularly with Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora is an expected source of inspiration due to her popularity, and the essays that highlight other lesser-known Black writers resonate better and make you feel as the reader you’re learning about or being reminded of a writer’s legacy.
Overall, the anthology is entertaining, but some stories are better than others and what inspires authors can sometimes be interesting and sometimes not, depending on how they write their inspiration story.
Songstress Mariah Carey enjoyed debut author success when her long-awaited memoir hit bookshelves last September. But the memoir that dives deep into how she found her voice in what she calls an abusive family environment has led to lawsuits from her siblings.
While promoting The Meaning of Mariah Carey with Oprah Winfrey on an Apple TV+ special last fall, Mariah said after years of therapy she calls Alison her “ex-sister” and Morgan her “ex-brother.” Her so-called former siblings now are suing her in New York Supreme Court over allegedly false and defamatory claims.
News broke this week that Morgan Carey, Mariah’s older brother, filed a lawsuit on March 3 against Mariah, co-author Michaela Angela Davis, Andy Cohen of Bravo fame whose imprint published the book, and Macmillan Publishers that owns Andy Cohen Books. Mariah’s older sister, Alison Carey, also had filed her own lawsuit on Feb. 3 solely against Mariah.
In the memoir, the singer describes several alleged violent interactions with her siblings. From the descriptions, lawsuits were expected, but it begs the question of how a memoirist can write her own story and portray real-life characters the way she interpreted their behavior and personality.
What Are the Allegations?
First, in Alison’s two-page complaint, she is representing herself and asking the court to have her sister pay $1.25 million in damages plus money for legal costs. She has issue with the chapter in Mariah’s memoir called “Dandelion Tea,” which is dedicated to Mariah’s allegedly dangerous experiences with her sister, who she claims tossed boiling hot water on her when she was 12 years old that made her black out and develop third-degree burns.
Alison says she was a troubled preteen, but she blames their mother, Patricia Carey, for allegedly forcing her to “attend terrifying middle-of-the-night satanic worship meetings that included ritual sacrifices and sexual activity.” Alison goes on to write that she has been diagnosed with a series of mental and physical health diseases. She says Mariah “used her status to attack her penniless sister” and “callously dismisses” her as an ex-sister.
Morgan also references in his lawsuit about being called publicly by Mariah as her ex-brother. He claims Mariah falsely depicted him as a “physically violent man.” In his own words, he alleges their father, Alfred Roy Carey, was the abuser and the reason he was placed in a children’s psychiatric center, a revelation Morgan says is an invasion of privacy. He says he believes he was portrayed as a stereotypical violent Black male for Mariah to “play the victim card and curry favor with the Black Lives Matter movement.” As part of the lawsuit, he attached a page of photos from over Mariah’s career of them together appearing happy to dispute his sister’s allegations.
Memory or Mismemory?
Memoirists have to reach for memories and describe those memories and the meaning behind what happened and how it impacted their lives. But as humans our minds may misinterpret an old memory and transform it. That’s a concern that impacts any writer writing their own true story.
“This is because memory is not just about retrieving stored information,” reads a Scientific American article on the unintentional phenomenon of misremembering, or the act of remembering incorrectly. “Our minds normally construct memories using a blend of remembered experiences and knowledge about the world. Our memories can be frazzled, though, by new experiences that end up tangling the past and the present.”
Should a writer discuss what they plan to tell in their story with people who will have a major appearance? It’s a question about how much to reveal about someone and how similar are the memories you share with that someone to ensure the right description makes it into the book. But if you’re not close to that particular someone, then reaching out can get murky. Also, reaching out could mean that someone wants their name and any reference to the event they’re mentioned in to be out of the book, subtracting some of the author’s freedom to express their story.
Your Truth or Their Truth?
Both of Mariah’s siblings say they weren’t contacted by the press for their sides of the story nor were given a copy of the unpublished book to verify any information.
There are memoirs, especially celebrity ones, that share private information about others without substituting names. Actress Demi Moore in her 2019 memoir Inside Out, for example, wrote she had taken actor Jon Cryer’s virginity. This aspect, of course, exploded in the media, but Jon issued a correction on Twitter saying he lost his virginity in high school before meeting Demi.
For Demi, her mismemory was forgiven though it involved sexual information that’s usually preferred to remain private.
Mariah hints at the alleged situation with her family in “Petals” off her 1999 Rainbow album.
Who Will Win?
When the lawsuits spill in claiming false and defamatory statements after a memoir is published, it’s hard to say how the court battle will go down. Most lawsuits head toward settlement as in we may never hear the result of the settlement if Mariah and her siblings believe that’s the best route to resolution.
In 2003, Augusten Burroughs published his memoir, Running with Scissors, that mentioned his time living with a family that he gave a fictional name. In the family’s chapter, he recounts abuse, drug use, and overall dysfunction. The real family filed a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit against the author and his publisher St. Martin’s Press. The author argued his memories were as accurate as he remembered, therefore what he wrote was true. The $2 million lawsuit settled outside of court with the author saying in his apology that the family’s memories were “different from my own,” The New York Times reported in 2007. The memoir became a movie starring Alec Baldwin and Annette Bening.
Mariah told The Hollywood Reporter in December amid her Apple TV+ Christmas special that she’s in talks to adapt her memoir for the screen. This is before the lawsuits were filed that may or may not impact any future projects, especially around the division of profits if that becomes part of the probable settlements.
If you are working on a memoir and worried about your memories sparking lawsuits, here are some resources to check out:
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.
Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a short story that explores the multidimensional emotion around pregnancy, especially for a professional woman who decides to raise her baby alone.
Zikora is a Nigerian lawyer working in Washington, D.C. who finds out she’s pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, Kwame. They are both on a similar career track, but Kwame assumed Zikora was on birth control when they had unprotected sex. Zikora swears she told Kwame she wasn’t on birth control and his willingness to have unprotected sex meant he was ready for commitment and children. As Kwame claims he didn’t know the consequences, Zikora decides to have their child on her own. At work, she downplays her pregnancy because she’s up for partnership at her law firm and is competing against a presumably White woman who brags about her childlessness. Her motivation to keep her child stems from a situation in college, but her fear of having a baby at the wrong time with the wrong partner emerges from other people’s situations like her cousin who has six children because she forgets to take her contraceptive and now feels stuck or another cousin’s cousin who fainted to death in a fancy hospital even though it was her third pregnancy. Zikora gives birth to a son and finds herself still in conflict with her mother over circumcising her son. It reminds her how her father left her mother for a second wife because her mother kept having miscarriages. With her newborn son, Zikora still checks her phone to see if Kwame will check in.
The story goes through all the layers of pregnancy for Zikora and the women in her family. From the miscarriages, abortions, illnesses, and deaths, the story shows a woman genuinely worried about the process and the aftermath – raising her son alone. How pregnancy takes a backseat to the obsession with work ethic plays a role as Zikora is climbing the corporate ladder but so is Kwame, who decides to walk away from the situation. Zikora feels her promotion is threatened because she chose to have a baby. Everything she has worked for is now hanging on a balance due to her natural desire to start a family. How pregnancy is viewed as a negative continues with the stories that haunt Zikora from her family and friends. What others say is the happiest moment of her life is marred by stress and confusion of how she will survive pregnancy and childbirth and how she will care for her son.
Overall, the story reveals the angles of pregnancy and shows the impact on one woman who’s trying to make sense of the experience. The wrong timing, the unplanned parenthood, and the wrong partner plagues Zikora’s pregnancy as she tries to see past those concerns and enjoy her baby.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*
Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne is a novel-in-verse featuring two Black girls engaged in a toxic friendship that is hanging on a thread, but the verse and the story fail to strike a chord.
Skyy, the main character’s name we learn on the last page, is a basketballer who feels less beautiful compared to other girls, especially her best friend Lay Li, who seems to be the most beautiful girl at school. Lay Li is a boy magnet while Skyy suppresses crushes on boys. So when Lay Li’s ex-boyfriend Shawn tries to get more information on her new boyfriend Curtis, Skyy disses Curtis. And like that Lay Li ignores Skyy like she ignores Shawn. In disbelief, Skyy works to get back in Lay Li’s good graces as she feels the pain of losing her best friend over a trivial situation. She can’t confide in Lay Li or her older sister Essa, who’s always mean, and she doesn’t see her cousin Inga, who’s always nice, enough. So she stays on the basketball court and falls for a boy named Clifton. They kiss, but Skyy feels sad that she can’t share this information with Lay Li. Days go by until Lay Li comes to Skyy to share her very different experience with Clifton.
The novel-in-verse is becoming a genre that literary agents want to boost in the industry. Except it’s difficult to tell a sufficient story that fits into a novel in verse. This book’s verse is borderline mediocre, some good parts but mostly so-so parts as in the combination of words are not impressive. For grammar geeks, the paragraph breaks aren’t placed in the best spots with ampersands starting at lines and capitalization is not used enough. For visual geeks, the cover is beautiful with the oranges and navy blues around a Black girl trying to find herself while rescuing a friendship.
Overall, the book is short but not as sweet as expected. The story has familiar elements with the athletic girl being best friends with the fashionable girl. Opposites attract, but in high school the athletic girl feels inferior to the fashionable girl because of the heightened attention on what is classified as beauty. And beauty means everything in adolescence when boys are in the picture, especially when the boys are the ones creating the division between the female friendships.
Self Made also known as On Her Own Ground by A’Lelia Bundles is an engrossing biography about Madam C.J. Walker, the Black woman behind a million-dollar hair care empire who became a Black History Month fixture yet the story of her life and rise to success is largely still shrouded.
Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana, Madam C.J. Walker lived in poverty for decades with marrying as a teenager after her formerly enslaved parents died, dealing with abusive marriages, then making pennies as a washwoman. At the time, she, like many other women, are dealing with severe hair loss, most likely due to the lack of daily cleanliness with the scarcity of water and soap. A hair care entrepreneur named Annie Turnbo helps Sarah grow her hair. With the success, Sarah makes her own products to help women grow their hair. She does everything in her power to hobnob with the wealthy in Indianapolis, where she ends up as the place to start her business with her third husband C.J. Walker and daughter Lelia from a previous marriage. One of the main people she tries to connect with is Booker T. Washington, the civil rights speaker, who believes Madam C.J. Walker’s hair care products are meant to straighten Black women’s hair to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards. It’s one of the fabrications about Madam C.J. Walker that she created the products, including the straightening comb, to straighten kinks out. This biography tries to decipher how this lie followed Madam C.J. Walker’s career as it derives from a newspaper article where a White reporter wrote the products are for straightening Black hair to be more like White hair.
The book is drenched in details. A’Lelia Bundles, an experienced journalist, is the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, named after the daughter Lelia, who later goes by A’Lelia when she becomes a Harlem socialite. With the journalism aspect, there’s context on top of context describing the historical, geographical, and socioeconomic conditions around Sarah and her career as she moves around the country to grow her business. Indianapolis is the city of choice during the Great Migration for Sarah to make it the business birthplace until the blossoming Harlem in New York City becomes the spot as the home of Black excellence. A lot of these details had been omitted in the shortened bios that people are given about Madam C.J. Walker, so it’s refreshing to get the whole story along with the thousands of obstacles that this history-making entrepreneur endured, which is a main aspect missing from those bios.
Annie Turnbo Malone, the hair care entrepreneur who may have inspired Madam C.J. Walker to start her own business, is portrayed in the Netflix series as a nemesis. In the story, there is conflict between the two women as competitors, but it’s not all-encompassing like the TV series made it seem. In the series, Annie Turnbo Malone is turned into a fictional character who is color-struck and upset that Madam C.J. Walker is finding more success. Most never heard of Annie Turnbo Malone, and the TV series messes up her image as a nemesis rather than a natural business competitor since she’s also a part of Black history, particularly when it comes to entrepreneurship. Annie Turnbo Malone also had a monstrously large business spanning states and a résumé reflecting philanthropy. The biography clears up the relationship that Netflix chose to construe for dramatic purposes.
The book also shows how Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia worked so hard to get the business off the ground and running that their physical health deteriorated. Both women died relatively young from hypertension and not being able to control it because they refused to slow down. They both had similar marriage problems with Madam C.J. Walker’s title being named after her third husband she was only married to for about six years, which turned out to be crucial years in the business hence her title. A’Lelia also had three short-lived marriages like her mother. Surprisingly, the marriage tumult doesn’t seem to derail the women’s ambitions as the company grows and takes young Black women under their wings to spread the success.
Overall, the biography is very well-researched and elaborately tells the full story of a Black woman seen as the grandmother of the modern-day billion-dollar Black hair care industry. The book was originally published as On Her Own Ground in 2001 and casually renamed Self Made after the Netflix series of the same name.
From left, Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Lela Rochon in "Waiting to Exhale."IMDb
Today is the 25th anniversary of Waiting to Exhale‘s cinematic debut, a film that brought a never-before-seen look into the ’90s grown Black female experience. The timing coincides with author sisters Attica and Tembi Locke embarking on a project to bring Terry McMillan’s best-selling novel to TV. Currently in pre-production, the series is following in the footsteps of the 1995 film and adding the TV binge element to screen.
Mystery novelist and Empire screenwriter Attica Locke and her sister, memoirist and actress Tembi Locke, are under a script commitment with ABC and Empire creator Lee Daniels to bring the story to TV, according to Deadline. The entertainment website also noted in November that Terry McMillan will serve as a consulting producer. It’s been 25 years since Waiting to Exhale sparked a cultural phenomenon among Black female viewers who wanted to see their stories onscreen.
The film Waiting to Exhale starred the late singer Whitney Houston as Savannah, a TV producer who longs for a married man; Angela Bassett as Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband is leaving her for a White woman; Loretta Devine as Gloria, an overweight single mother who owns a hair salon; and Lela Rochon as Robin, an executive trying to elevate from mistress to wife. The story and film is set in Phoenix, Arizona, a city known for a low Black population but symbolically represents a phoenix rising from the ashes and starting over.
In Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America about being the first Black female reporter at The Washington Post, she discusses the cultural impact of the film that opened in theaters on Dec. 22, 1995. She recounts the moment with her friend and Post executive, Joyce Richardson, and quotes her saying:
“‘Just like the friendship of the characters Gloria, Robin, Savannah, and Bernadine, our get-togethers lifted us up when we were down, helped us network, gave us shoulders to lean on, advice when we needed it, and a safe place to share the good and bad times,” she said. “Each of us could connect with the issues that these women had in one way or another.'”
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
The book’s characters are trying to figure out their relationships with men, which impact family, faith, and career, but it brings them closer as a way to de-stress. Friendship between women over men troubles is a common theme in works, but Waiting to Exhale incorporates the Black female perspective, which in 1992 was rare in contemporary literature.
With the 2000s HBO series Sex and the City still in reruns based on a novel by Candace Bushnell, the stories don’t age with time. But with Black women as the stars during a time when 47% of Black adults are single in a dating-app world, according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, the new show could resonate on a higher level than it did 25 years ago.
How the new version of Waiting to Exhale will be perceived in the #MeToo era, where women are looking for female friendships but may not be bonding over men trouble, has yet to be seen.
Amid the #BlackStoriesMatter movement sparked by the George Floyd protests, Terry McMillan tweeted earlier this year that she wasn’t getting the same amount of interest for her 2020 novel, It’s Not All Downhill From Here.
Attica Locke released her latest book, Heaven, My Home, last year. She’s also worked on the Netflix miniseries When They See Us about the Black men formerly known as the Central Park Five. Her sister, Tembi Locke, is an actress and wrote a grief memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, about moving forward without her late husband. The memoir, a former Reese’s Book Club pick, is on track to become a film on Netflix with the aid of Hollywood bookwoman Reese Witherspoon.
*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*
His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie dives into African family relations that can arrange an marriage yet destroy it at the same time.
The story opens with Afi, a twentysomething struggling seamstress and failed student living in Ghana, preparing for her wedding. Without her husband, whom she never met. Going through with the marriage because of her shortcomings, Afi also wants to please her mother who wants to please Aunty Faustina Ganyo, a wealthy woman in the community who has her hands on everything―and likes it that way. Afi knows her mother never recovered from her father’s death, and now the head of their extended family is her stingy Uncle Pious. But Afi’s mother has received a lot of help from Aunty, and Aunty offering her favorite son Elikem “Eli” Ganyo to Afi to marry is the ultimate gift.
Moving away from her small village of Ho to the big city of Accra, Afi lives in a luxury apartment. Without her husband, whom she still has never met. It turns out Aunty set up Afi with Eli because she doesn’t like Eli’s Liberian girlfriend Muna. Not only is Muna not Ghanaian, but she’s too tall, has a manly shape, and a “roasted coffee beans” complexion, and she smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and refuses to connect with the family and culture, according to the Ganyos. Plus, the daughter Muna had with Eli is battling sickle cell anemia, and they had already lost a child due to the same illness, so the Ganyos see Muna as a threat to their family line. But they also said Eli will leave Muna for Afi, who is light-skinned and Ghanaian, exactly what the Ganyos prefer for Eli’s wife. As Afi and Eli finally get close, Afi realizes that she still lives in the apartment while Muna lives in the mansion. She fights to get in the mansion, and when she does, she thinks the fight for Eli’s affection is over. But it’s far from over.
Afi is a young woman who doesn’t come from money and has had her education hopes dashed after failing entrance exams twice. But her luck changes once she becomes a wife with money and a career thanks to her connections to a rich family. This novel shows the evolution of a woman who learns the sacrifices to find love and reach her dreams are based on a choice that was made on her behalf at her expense. The ties to the Ganyos threatens Afi and her mother, who desperately wants to keep Aunty happy since Aunty gave her her job and her humble home after her husband died. Afi’s mother depends heavily on Aunty, which means Afi needs to depend on Aunty and her every word. Afi is torn between what she wants from Eli, her allegedly lawful husband, and how her demands could impact her mother, her uncle, and other members of her family back at home where the Ganyos reign over the territory. The tug of war between her family and in-laws puts Afi in the middle, and she eventually decides to put herself first.
Overall, the story flows well with Afi becoming stronger only because she has to fight her family in the fight for love.
*Reviewed by a dedicated member of the Lambily who has waited for this story for three decades*
The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey is an in-depth celebrity memoir that highlights the intersection of racial and familial trauma and how the world-famous songstress converted the pain into laser focus on talent exploration and superstardom success.
Mariah clarifies that this is her story from her perspective as she describes her family in the negative light that she viewed them. The story starts with Mariah’s childhood that hints at trauma described in many of her songs from “Outside” on the Butterfly album to “Petals” on the Rainbow album. The youngest of three children, Mariah is years apart from her teenage brother Morgan and sister Allison, who were both already showing signs of psychological damage from growing up in an interracial family in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. Mariah also has the fairest complexion that makes her a target of sibling abuse ranging from her brother exhibiting violence to the point where cops are called to her sister pimping her out to a grown man. Race plays a huge part with her Black father and White mother and seeps into her upbringing as she lives with her mother in a White section of Long Island and visits her father in Black Harlem. The location forces Mariah to attend predominantly White schools where she’s called racial slurs on an everyday basis for being Black. Then when she hangs out with her father and her Black cousins on the weekend she feels her complexion comes up in the question of her paternity. One of the issues that bothers little Mariah the most is that her mother never could wrangle her curls. The untidiness of her appearance brings self-esteem down even more until her opera singer mother trains her to sing, and music becomes Mariah’s saving grace.
A major portion of the book covers a few chapters on her tumultuous marriage to Sony Music executive Tommy Mottola, who discovered her and became her first husband. Mariah goes into detail about how what looks like a storybook fairy tale romance is slow torture to her twentysomething self. She even calls the mansion in upstate New York she shared with Tommy “Sing Sing” like the infamous prison. Metaphorically, she describes the luxurious baths she would take as washing off the Mariah Carey persona to become an unhappy housewife. The mental abuse is more described here with what Mariah calls Tommy’s incessant anger that was shown to her all the time and visible to others in his inner circle.
There are explanations for some of her obsessions that have been magnified in the media to make her seem frivolous. For example, she connects with her idol Marilyn Monroe after seeing her in film as a young girl and learning little Norma Jeane Mortenson also had a tumultuous childhood. Mariah is “eternally twelve” because the physical and emotional abuse hit a fever pitch at that age where she wishes she could be a regular kid.
Like Mariah said on her book tour, what she says is unimportant is not in the book from the highly publicized engagement and breakup with Aussie billionaire James Packer to the highly publicized stint and battle on American Idol with rapper Nicki Minaj. She also brilliantly throws shade at other highly publicized events from her career to show the media monster she’s over it. And shade is hinted toward Jennifer Lopez, who Mariah claims she does not know, and now we know the subtle beef started way before the meme.
Overall, this is an extraordinary celebrity memoir by Mariah, along with her co-writer and Black cultural writer Michaela Angela Davis, that emphasizes her biracial identity and how that impacted her family and her drive. Because of the depth, it’s recommended to read the actual book though the audiobook is also an excellent choice due to the amount of well-known lyrics within the chapters. There is a lot of digging deep into the construct of race and how it could destroy individuals with Mariah describing her journey of working to overcome the obstacles placed in her path.
The novel became a No. 1 best-seller and the film hit No. 1 on Christmas weekend 1995, dominating over Disney and Pixar’s first computer-animated venture Toy Story, Jumanji, and Grumpier Old Men.
