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Bookish TV Throwback: Maya Wilkes’ Book Launch on ‘Girlfriends’

Girlfriends fans rejoiced last month when star Tracee Ellis Ross shared on Instagram a video of her former co-stars Golden Brooks, Jill Marie Jones, and Persia White. As they all prepare for a long-awaited reunion appearance tonight on Tracee’s current TV gig, ABC’s Black-ish, fans may wonder if the book that defined Girlfriends will come up in conversation.

The reunion even produced an Entertainment Weekly first-look profile of the Black-ish episode that will revolve around Tracee’s character’s Rainbow and her feminist friends from college. But Girlfriends, a UPN sitcom that celebrated four single Black women living in 2000s Los Angeles, produced its own best-selling Oh Hell Yes! by Maya Wilkes, played by Golden.

Oh Hell Yes! is the fictional self-help book told in a “homegirl” tone. It obviously paved the way for today’s hits from mostly white women authors like Jen Sincero’s You Are a Total Badass to Rachel Hollis’ Girl, Wash Your Face.

“The Way We Were” is Maya’s book launch episode, running on Feb. 21, 2005, over a decade before TV shows that brought a book into the storyline actually worked with a real-life publisher to get the book on shelves, a newer tactic made popular by bookish shows like Younger and Jane the Virgin have done.

Maya (Golden Brooks)

To give some background, Maya is a single mom and recent divorcee who works as a paralegal for lawyer Joan Clayton, played by Tracee. Joan’s friends from UCLA includes Toni Childs, played by Jill Marie, and Lynn Searcy, played by Persia. So they’re all friends navigating the highs and lows of being professional Black women in the big city. At the time, the show was coined as a comedic Black version of Sex and the City or an updated Living Single.

Maya is nervous at the book launch inside the fictional Crenshaw Bookstore. They huddle behind a bookshelf to calm Maya before her “authoress” debut. (Maya dramatically called herself an “authoress” throughout the series).

“Don’t let fear make you its bitch,” Toni soothes Maya.

“Wow, that’s good. Who wrote that?” Maya asks.

“You.”

Maya freaks out about forgetting her own advice and heads to the podium. Joan is avoiding William, played by Reggie Hayes who’s also a lawyer and the fifth unofficial “girlfriend.” William shows up at the book-signing, after their awkward short-lived relationship.

As the event starts, each of the friends read an excerpt. “Don’t be hatin’ what your mama spent nine months creatin'” is one of Maya’s proverbs read aloud.

Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross)
Lynn (Persia White)
Toni (Jill Marie Jones)

After the readings, Maya thanks her cousin/publicist, her current boss William, and her friends.

“I also have to thank my girls,” she says. “Joan, Toni, and Lynn. You three have been my rock for these past few years, and the inspiration for my book. Because if y’all haven’t been manless, crazy heifers, there wouldn’t have been anything to write about.”

During the book-signing, Maya’s ex-husband Darnell, played by Khalil Kain, makes a surprise appearance to get his book signed. Of course, Maya takes this the wrong way, which leads to a fake cookout at Joan’s house the next day so she could wear her booty shorts for Darnell. But when Darnell, the sole attendee, shows up trying to figure out the situation, he breaks the news he’s engaged to his girlfriend.

Oh Hell Yes! played a pivotal role across seasons as Maya began writing the manuscript in her community college class as an essay. While dropping gems of wisdom at her cousin’s hair salon, customers became hooked to Maya’s no-nonsense advice to living your best life. This leads to a self-publishing adventure, where she’s even selling copies on the freeway ramp to drivers. She does finally get a big-time publishing deal, but she loses that deal once she can’t concoct a follow-up.

The show was ahead of the self-publishing wave and the self-help book wave. Books like Oh Hell Yes! are everywhere in bookstores, especially from women who have built a career through the internet and social media. As a Black female author, Maya also went the self-publishing route since it’s still hard for women of color to get book deals from top publishers.

If you’re looking for a binge, Girlfriends has eight seasons currently airing in reruns on BET and TV One and is available on streaming via CW Seed.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

With so many concerts going on around the LA area Friday night, I decided to look for an event more my pace. Luckily, on Facebook I found Celeste Ng was scheduled to speak and sign books at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Her newest novel Little Fires Everywhere had been gaining momentum on the best-seller lists, and since I recently read and enjoyed Everything I Never Told You, I went to the event to get insight on the author’s work and writing process.

In Little Fires Everywhere, a suburban mother is dealing with her house burning down amid her seemingly perfect life and trying to piece together what sparks ignited the blaze. The story takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio — the author’s second hometown — and at the event she spoke about the “metaphorically rich” planned community and how rules shape it. She used the example of how residents couldn’t leave trash cans out on the curb for collection; it was too messy, so the city had golf carts go in the back of residents’ houses to fetch the trash to bring it up the driveway to the truck at the curb.

This fascinated me. In the book jacket, her bio reads she grew up in Shaker Heights — where she said she lived from 10 to college — and Pittsburgh. Recently I had just realized I spent half my childhood in Chicago and the other half in Sacramento. The most recent novel I’m working on surrounds a teenage girl secretly becoming a mermaid at a nightclub in Chicago, but I based the character’s neighborhood on my original neighborhood of Rogers Park that had such an idyllic quality that it didn’t feel like it was in Chicago, and from Celeste’s description maybe more like Shaker Heights. And I too had moved to Sacramento at age 10 up to college. Chicago has more personality, of course, but maybe Northern California suburban living might creep up into a later story.  

Celeste also discussed her writing process and how the idea of her latest novel  germinated in 2009 but the actual writing didn’t come until after 2014’s Everything I Never Told You. So the characters evolved in her head, so she encouraged writers to not be so consumed with how long the story is taking to get on paper and then the long road to being published. She even praised how Sweet Tarts and other candies got her through writing, with a tweet about Sweet Tarts catching the attention of the company that sent her a package. Like many writers, she worked at home, the library, and cafes, which felt inspiring since it felt like I could create a great novel though I spent so much time writing it in all the same places near me.

The event drew a packed room with about 75 or so people braving rush hour traffic. I bought the hardcover book and got it signed, but I choked when I met her because I wanted to tell her about my author aspirations. Sometimes, I can get my words out when meeting authors quickly at book signings and sometimes not, but she was polite and I’m looking forward to reading the novel soon. 

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘The Education of Margot Sanchez’ by Lilliam Rivera

Tuesday night, I attended the launch party for The Education of Margot Sanchez by Lilliam Rivera. After hearing buzz around the novel for months, I traded in a night of writing to see a novel officially enter the literary space.

I’m working on a young adult novel with elements of The Little Mermaid that will deal with teenage hardships, gang violence, academic pressures, and young love. So when I heard about this novel, I waited with anticipation and luckily received an invitation through my book club.

The story surrounds the title character punished for stealing her father’s credit card to buy designer duds to wear at her prep school. Her punishment is to become one of the cashieristas at her family’s market. Coming of age in the Bronx as a young Latina juggling with class issues and gentrification was a story rarely seen in the young adult genre. 

The past two years have exploded with more characters of color ushering a new face to the genre. When I was a teen devouring library books, all the heroines I admired were presumably white, with the race of other characters defined. I saw my personality traits in those characters but wished at least one or two could look like me on the cover and understand my brown-skinned world. With Lilliam Rivera and Nicola Yoon, who presently has both her latest novels on the bestseller’s list at the same time, the game is evolving for the generation of girls looking for characters they can relate to, on a cultural and racial level. 

The party attracted around 60 people at Other Books in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood undergoing gentrification, and incorporated the book’s New York flavor with a deejay blasting hip-hop goodies. I usually bail on book launch parties because they take place after a long day at work, but it was nice to see a celebration for a book and the author talking about it with others.