Tag: celebrity writers

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Thicker than Water’ by Kerry Washington

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. 

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘The Woman in Me’ by Britney Spears

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears pulls the curtain back on the making of one of the biggest pop stars the world has ever seen and reveals how her superstardom eclipsed her familial trauma.

Taking the title from the lyrics of the 2001 hit “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” from the Britney album and Crossroads soundtrack, the long-awaited memoir made headlines with the sordid details of Britney’s relationship with fellow pop star and Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake during the turn of the century where tabloid articles and paparazzi photos overtook the media landscape. But there’s more to Britney’s life story starting in Kentwood, Louisiana. Born 25 miles away in McComb, Mississippi (also R&B pop star Brandy’s birthplace), Britney is a little girl who loves singing and dancing.

The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life—those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.

Her father, Jamie, transitions through jobs as a welder to a construction worker to a gym owner, while her mother, Lynne, runs a daycare center raising Britney and her brother, Bryan. Britney scores opportunities to audition for The All New Mickey Mouse Club and perform on Star Search. Like many future stars at the time, once these opportunities end, she is back home. Her family eventually welcomes her younger sister, Jamie Lynn. The family dynamic is volatile. Her father is an alcoholic. Her mother smokes and yells constantly. She feels the most in power when she is performing. 

“Tragedy runs in my family,” Britney writes when telling the story of her paternal grandmother, known as Jean, who was committed to an asylum by Britney’s grandfather after losing a baby. Her grandmother was 31 years old when she shot herself with a shotgun over her infant son’s grave. New York Magazine covered this story in November 2022 in a longform piece that explores Britney’s ancestral tree on the Spears side to set the background for the conservatorship that ended in November 2021. Like her grandmother, Britney suffers from mental health issues after having her two sons a year apart. She says she had been forced to take Prozac for years. She had been hospitalized, where she says she was given lithium instead. Lithium was the drug her grandmother had taken as well. And like her grandmother, the reason why her mental health had destabilized is misunderstood. 

I was a little girl with big dreams. I wanted to be a star like Madonna, Dolly Parton, or Whitney Houston. I had simpler dreams, too, dreams that seemed even harder to achieve and that felt too ambitious to say out loud: I want my dad to stop drinking. I want my mom to stop yelling. I want everyone to be okay.

One aspect that seems to have been dominated by the Justin Timberlake headlines is the mistreatment Britney endured being married to backup dancer and wannabe rapper Kevin Federline. The father of her two children, Kevin disappears into recording studios and industry parties while Britney is breastfeeding one son and is pregnant with another one. As her marriage is falling apart and her custody arrangement goes against her, paparazzi stalk her more than ever to capture photos of her in disarray. Then in 2007,  she shaves her head at a barbershop with camera lens catching the moment outside. A few weeks later, she strikes a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. The media salivates over these incidents and brands them as erratic, but Britney blames the stress on her postpartum depression, her divorce, the death of her aunt, and her family’s failure to help her properly through the grief. Throughout the book, she clarifies her emotions during events that dominated tabloids because her voice was misconstrued or silenced when it came to defending herself. 

The memoir serves as further defense for her sanity, post-conservatorship. Now, Britney makes headlines strictly with her Instagram usage. She often tapes herself dancing and modeling clothes with smoky eyes. In the book, she explains she finally has the right to express herself through photography. She owns the images and reels she shares on social media and poses for the camera of her volition. 

I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begun to think in some ways like a child.

As for her infamous relationships, she was 24 and 25 years old when she had her sons. She married Kevin at 22 years old in 2004. That was only 2½ years after her unexpected breakup with Justin. When a girl falls in love with a boy at eleven years old and reconnects with him in a relationship plastered on every tabloid page, it’s natural for judgment to lead to soul mate talk. The raw emotion on the pages of Britney’s memoir just shows how she had to grow and move on from a relationship that seemed like it could last forever. Showbusiness had gotten in the way of both her major romances, which both ended disastrously with her receiving the weight of the judgment as the woman. 

Though she discusses her most memorable tours and appearances, Britney uses the memoir to give us a picture of the life she tried to make private until it was forced into privacy with her 13-year conservatorship. She describes the loneliness of performing while under a conservatorship like serving as a reality show judge and headlining a Las Vegas residency. A conservatorship is defined in legal terms as the designation of a conservator by a court to manage the financial and personal affairs of an incapacitated or incompetent individual, minor, or older adult with limited capacity. Britney was under a conservatorship when she shouldn’t have been classified as incapacitated or incompetent since she worked under extreme pressure. When the legal battle to gain back her independence started in 2020, many fans didn’t realize what a conservatorship entailed. Now, that her father is no longer her conservator, she is free, but she lost many years of her adulthood not having the freedom to control her wealth, decide on what to put in her body, or even drive her car. 

Looking back, I think that both Justin and Kevin were very clever. They knew what they were doing, and I played right into it. That’s the thing about this industry. I never knew how to play the game. I didn’t know how to play the game.

Overall, the memoir gives Britney a chance to explain her side of the story, which was largely ignored or misconstrued by the media machine. The book is written in her voice (think her lengthy Instagram captions), where you can tell she is sorting out her feelings and emotions during difficult times of her life. She chose Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams to record the audiobook on her behalf, which is unusual, especially for a celebrity who uses her voice to opt out of recording her own story. How you use your speaking voice can vary greatly compared to how you use your singing voice. The way the entertainment industry took a young Southern girl who loved to perform and transformed her into a robot to sell millions of albums and concert tickets took an insurmountable toll on the pop star. Now, that her story is out in the open, it seems like she is setting the parameters for her life.

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what's lit

Tamera Mowry-Housley Describes How Making Friends Is Like Drinking Wine

Sister, Sister star Tamera Mowry-Housley is promoting her new memoir that resonates on the vein of Gabrielle Union‘s memoirs with incorporating the significance of drinking wine and learning lessons.

In her first TV stop on the book tour, Tamera spoke to Jericka Duncan, Nate Burleson, and Tony Dokoupil on CBS Mornings Tuesday about You Should Sit Down for This: A Memoir About Life, Wine, + Cookies. She told the co-anchors she hopes readers will understand her words of wisdom, or what she calls “Tameraisms.”

“The one thing that I want people to take away is that I didn’t live this perfect life,” she said in the interview. “They usually see me, and they’re like, ‘Tamera, you’re always so happy. You always look very joyful.’ And the thing is I choose to be happy. My circumstances do not define me.”

Tamera was 15, along with her identical twin sister Tia Mowry, when they became breakout stars on the WB sitcom Sister, Sister. After that early success, Tamera and Tia starred in movies together as adults like Seventeen Again with their young brother Tahj Mowry, and Twitches, a Black Halloween Disney classic that spawned a sequel. The sisters also filmed a popular reality TV series on the now-defunct Style Network.

Over the years, the sisters have carved out their own independent paths. Tamera went on to be a co-host on The Real for six seasons and won an Emmy Award with the panel that included author and comedienne Loni Love. She has been busy working on Hallmark and Lifetime productions, including a starring role in the film Girlfriendship that debuted last Saturday on the Hallmark Channel under its Mahogany brand.

Calling herself an “old soul,” Tamera said she felt self-conscious at a young age with feeling wiser than her years. She’s now embracing her “gift.”

“I wanted my readers to know you may have a rough start, but you just have to move forward and push through, but you also—I always say—you can’t cheat at life,” she said. “It doesn’t come easy. You’re not going to grow as a person if you don’t look at your trials or ‘negative’ experiences and face them head-on. The book is about growth. The book is about my wisdom that I have learned along the way.”

Going off of the book’s subtitle, she talked about how she chooses her friends like how she chooses her wine. She co-owns a family winery in Napa with her husband, former Fox News correspondent Adam Housley.

“For me, wine is very subjective, but now owning a winery and tasting lots of wine, I don’t want to waste my experience and my taste buds on bad wine. It’s the same thing with friends,” she said. “You eventually either change your environment or your environment is going to change you, another Tameraism that’s not in the book.”

The book is out now from Legacy Lit, a Hachette Book Group imprint.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Acne’ by Laura Chinn

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. 

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When Book Banning Turns Violent

SHE LIT: When Book Banning Turns Violent

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Safety concerns for writers of banned books take spotlight amid Salman Rushdie attack

The freedom of speech through writing is being examined this week after award-winning novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times at an event where he was speaking about his work.

A week ago today, The Satanic Verses author was stabbed while on stage at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education center in western New York that regularly invites authors and other creatives to provide lectures. Currently jailed, the assailant reportedly planned the attack after reading two pages of the author’s controversial 1988 novel. The novel provoked the Iranian leader in 1989 to deliver a fatwa ordering anyone the right to kill the author and his publishers.

Despite feelings toward the book’s content and the author’s alleged behavior toward his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi detailed in her memoir, the literary community is shocked by the violent attack over a banned book as freedom of speech seems to be increasingly under threat for writers.

Organizations such as PEN America came out in support of Salman Rushdie. Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, wrote in a statement: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” The statement also revealed that the author had emailed the organization that day to “help with placements for Ukrainian writers in need of safe refuge from the grave perils they face.”

PEN America pushed the hashtag campaign #StandWithSalman, which has so far included messages of support from Stephen King and Jeffrey Eugenides. The organization held an event Friday morning with writers reading Salman Rushdie’s works on the steps of The New York Public Library.

Meanwhile, The Satanic Verses reached top spots on the Amazon.com and USA Today best-sellers list. I bought the Kindle version of the novel on Amazon after seeing the long library waits on my Libby app. Raised in a Christian and Muslim household, I wondered about the Islamic themes in the novel, a work of fiction that takes a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses.

Historians who study religion believe the Islamic prophet Muhammad took the advice of these goddesses believing they were messages from God and preached those messages to his followers. Then the archangel Gabriel appeared and told Muhammad those were not messages from God but from Satan. This religious story is disputed, hence the global controversy around The Satanic Verses that has led to deaths and injuries for many of the novelist’s translators and publishers since the declaration of the fatwa.

When news of the attack broke, some social media users pointed out Padma Lakshmi’s account of her marriage to Salman Rushdie, a short-lived union out of a longtime relationship that many people are learning about now. After seeing Padma speak at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2016, I audio-read her memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate and recall how her endometriosis diagnosis contributed to their divorce.

Padma, the Top Chef host who brilliantly interweaves her love for food into her life story, shares her thoughts on the famous author, calling him an Indian Hemingway who attracted her “in the soul-sucking intellectual desert that L.A.” was for her.

“Recently I could remember my husband complaining that I rarely wanted to make love, and when I did it was only after we had been drinking. He felt justifiably rejected,” she writes. The second chapter brings up their decline in intimacy due to her reproductive disorder but paints the respected novelist Salman Rushdie as an inconsiderate spouse frustrated by the lack of sex.

Yes, intimate details about two renowned individuals spilled onto the pages of a memoir, but those passages were also brought up in the discussion of last week’s attack. Her tweet revealing her ex-husband’s improving condition almost gained 20,000 likes.

The Satanic Verses shooting up best-seller lists 34 years after it was published shows readers still stand by freedom of speech. At the time of its publishing, the novel had been banned in multiple countries with significant Muslim populations including Iran.

The trend of buying banned books is happening to more recent releases like Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby that peaked on best-seller lists after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz decried its antiracism message during the confirmation hearings in March for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

When people want to attack books, readers are more likely to buy the books. The purchase can be out of curiosity for the content that’s being banned. Why don’t they want me to read this? In the case for The Satanic Verses, it takes a story from a holy book and reimagines that story in a fictional way interwoven with magical realism.

How the book is classified as fiction must be reiterated since the three-decade upheaval makes it seem like the book is nonfiction. There has been debate about how to approach religious texts classified as nonfiction that can be considered anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, or against a particular religion and be misconceived by readers for truth when there are inaccuracies. But this isn’t the case here.

Because Salman Rushdie had a fatwa on him, his safety has been a concern for over 30 years. But with so many books being banned, we have to wonder how high the concern is for other authors’ safety that could be at risk over their decisions to openly discuss their works in public.

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Penguin Random House, ViacomCBS execs testify at trial

The latest in the blockbuster antitrust trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House in its bid to buy Simon & Schuster featured the Penguin Random House CEO and ViacomCBS corporate strategy officer taking the stand this week.

Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh explained at the trial how the publisher gives advances to authors and how it doesn’t have the power to grant which books become best-sellers, according to Publisher’s Weekly. She calls the publishing process about selecting books based on profit and loss reports “highly subjective.”

Alex Berkett, chief corporate development and strategy officer at ViacomCBS, testified that the parent company of Simon & Schuster wanted the publisher to go to a good “home.”

Elizabeth Acevedo shares title page of first adult novel

Young adult extraordinaire Elizabeth Acevedo, who has received acclaim for her first three novels, announced she submitted her first adult novel for editing. The author behind The Poet X, With the Fire on High, and Clap When You Land posted on Instagram a photo of a Word Doc on her computer screen with the title Family Lore.

In the post, she says she spent the summer focused on finishing the book that required her to tap into a “creative force on another level” in order to enjoy “crafting and blossoming a new self and a new body of work.”

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"I'm Glad My Mom Died" by Jennette McCurdy

Book Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

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Book Review: ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died’ by Jennette McCurdy

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.

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‘Nope’ Star Keke Palmer Wrote Books to Share Her Talent

<![CDATA[SHE LIT: ‘Nope’ Star Wrote Books to Share Her Talent 💁🏾‍♀️]]> SHE LIT: ‘Nope’ Star Wrote Books to Share Her Talent 💁🏾‍♀️

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📚 Join the #shelitbookclub on July 31 as we discuss the novel Red Clocks by Leni Zumas amid the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Details can be found here.

Keke Palmer - Photograph by John Johnson/HBO Max

Keke Palmer already told us who she is in her memoir and Amazon story collection

On this day as Beyoncé drops her long-awaited album Renaissance, let’s talk about Keke Palmer, who dominated the entertainment news this week, and tie that news to books.

Coming off a weekend spooked by Jordan Peele’s western thriller Nope, media attention focused squarely on star Keke Palmer. Rarely does a megahit have three actors of color on billboards, which included Keke, Daniel Kaluuya, and Steven Yeun, but allegations of colorism overshadowed the Twitterverse similar to Jean Jacket in the film.

A viral tweet where a tweeter brought up colorism in why Keke’s success may appear to not have the “mainstream popularity” Zendaya’s has struck a debate. The tweeter implied that Keke didn’t have the career like that of Zendaya, a star in her own right who was irrelevant to any conversation on Nope, but tried to clarify in the Twitter thread that the main tweet was to counter the remarks from people who say Nope is Keke’s breakout role.

In a clapback, Keke reminded us about her career and how she’s an “incomparable talent.” As media outlets reported on the story, many failed to point to her memoir and story collection that tell us about the career Lauren Keyana “Keke” Palmer has created for herself.

The tweeter implied that Keke is considered a star in fewer households compared to Zendaya, who is biracial and has a lighter complexion. Though both have kid sitcom roots, both these shining Black female stars do indeed lead different careers, and Keke set the record straight saying the tweet perpetuated colorism to even compare the two. She went on to remind us that she was the first Black Cinderella on Broadway and the youngest talk show host ever, to name a few accomplishments.

As the articles came out about the Twitter clarification and the timeline of Keke’s extraordinary career, barely any articles mentioned her books. Yes, like most celebrities, Keke received help writing those books, but still she has her name on several books that are available in print, e-book, and audio formats showcasing her dramatic voice punching up the personality on page.

Along with Nope, Keke lent her voice to another summer blockbuster out in theaters now: Lightyear, the Pixar animated film serving as a precursor to the Toy Story series that opened in June and so far grossed $117 million in the domestic box office. She also uses her voice in the audio recordings of her short story collection “Southern Belle Insults” that she released with Amazon Publishing last year and wrote with best-selling romance novelist Jasmine Guillory. The stories were based on her Instagram alter egos.

In My Dear Friend Janet, Keke uses her high-pitched drama queen narrator voice for Lady Miss who’s telling the story of a woman named Janet going through her day trying to come out of her shell but second-guesses her scripted plans. Then Janet agrees to put on a wig and transforms into Lady Miss, a story that continues in From the Desk of Lady Miss.

To back up her response, one can glean the facts of her career from child actor getting industry recognition (she remains the youngest actor to receive a SAG Award nomination at age 11 for her 2004 role in The Wool Cap) to grown-up star still getting industry recognition in her memoir I Don’t Belong to You: Quiet the Noise and Find Your Voice from Simon & Schuster’s Gallery Books.

The 2017 book starts off telling her unlikely rise to stardom with her mother helping her take risks to get noticed by people like Ice Cube when the producer was looking for a young actress to play Queen Latifah’s character’s niece in the 2005 film Beauty Shop. A year later, buzz started to build for her starring role in Akeelah and the Bee, as a Black preteen from South Los Angeles who gets coached by Laurence Fishburne’s character to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Entertainers, particularly those of color, for example, have to prove themselves time and time again as random social media users may have their opinionated tweets go viral that forces the stars to respond to crush the negative publicity. Keke had to respond on the weekend Nope debuted in movie theaters at No. 1 because all eyes were on her.

But like many celebrity bookwomen, she had already told us who she is and how she operates in her memoir and story collection. Books sometimes are the forgotten vehicle competing with the internet when we want to learn about an individual. Excluding the unauthorized biographies, although those can be helpful at times, the books with the celebrities’ names on the book covers and their voices on the audiobooks are the stories those celebrities approved.

Those stories were carried out through their literary and business agents. They have a say on who helps them co-author those stories. That being said, her co-authors also deserve the credit, but those stories are still from Keke, who graced us with storytelling talents on top of being one of the youngest people, regardless of diversity markers, to be dominating Hollywood.

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President Obama shares summer reading list

Days after his wife and former First Lady Michelle Obama announced her new book, former President Barack Obama shared his top books for the summer Tuesday on Instagram. Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson, and The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan made the list.

Constance Wu returns to the scene with memoir news

Actress Constance Wu is slowly reemerging into the spotlight with a new memoir titled Making a Scene. Published by Scribner, the essay collection is expected out in October. She recently revealed her suicide attempt after sharing her disappointment of her TV show ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat being renewed in 2020 when her film career was taking off. The Hustlers and book-to-film Crazy Rich Asians alum said she had to take a break from social media but lately has been posting about past and current projects.

Journalist Goldie Taylor announces childhood memoir

Former editor at large for The Daily Beast Goldie Taylor will have her life story in book form. The Love You Save echoes Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as she tells the story of how being raped by a man in her neighborhood leads to her living in East St. Louis with an aunt. Abuse continues in her new home, but she finds solace in James Baldwin’s words. The memoir is planned for release in January from Hanover Square Press.

Whoopi Goldberg shares re-release of her middle grade series

Actress, comedienne, and The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg posted a video of herself opening boxes to reveal the re-release of her Sugar Plum Ballerinas series. Originally published in 2008 by Disney Book Group’s now-defunct Jump at the Sun imprint, the first two books, Plum Fantastic and Toeshoe Trouble, are getting a makeover from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers as the stories focus on young ballerinas of color. The updated versions of the books have new artwork on their covers and are now available through Hachette Audio narrated by Bahni Turpin.

More bookish headlines:

Hollywood favorite Book Soup employees unionize

Books Are Magic in New York City is opening a second location

Bookstore owner says racist trolls keep adding her business to a boycott list

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"Zyla & Kai" by Kristina Forest

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Meena Harris Adds Phenomenal Book Club to Growing Multimedia Portfolio

Meena Harris attends the Los Angeles screening of “Women of the Movement”. The series is based on the true story of Mamie Till-Mobley, who in 1955 risked her life to find justice after her son Emmett was brutally murdered in the Jim Crow South. The six-episode series will air in three parts beginning Jan. 6, 2022 for three consecutive weeks on ABC.

For a 2021 literary lookback, we noticed Phenomenal Media mature this year with the addition of a book club focused on exposing readers to works by underrepresented authors, particularly women of color.

The four-year-old company founded by Meena Harris launched the Phenomenal Book Club in November with choosing The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and its young readers’ companion The 1619 Project: Born on the Water as the inaugural picks and inviting author and editor Nikole Hannah-Jones and illustrator Nikkolas Smith to a virtual event. Phenomenal Book Club was the exclusive book club partner for the books based on The New York Times project named after the year enslaved Africans first came to the U.S.

A bona fide social media star, lawyer, and activist, Meena is best known for being the niece of our first female, first Black, and first Asian second-in-command, Vice President Kamala Harris. Her pro-vaccine Dec. 21 tweet announcing she has a breakthrough case of Covid-19 after receiving her booster shot went viral with over 70,000 likes. The success online, her family connections, and her entrepreneurial activism spirit has opened doors for her to grow her media company named after Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Phenomenal Woman.”

Besides her history-making aunt, Meena’s family tree also consists of her mother Maya Harris, who has also developed a reputation expressing her activism via Twitter as a lawyer and policy expert; her stepfather Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber; and her late grandmother Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist whose story is told in Kamala’s 2020 memoir The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.

Expressing activism through books

Like her aunt, Meena has a publishing career. She wrote two children’s books: Ambitious Girl, published by Little, Brown Young Readers and illustrated by Marissa Valdez, about a girl finding her journey to overcome the “too ambitious” label; and Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, published by HarperCollins’ imprint Balzer + Bray and illustrated by Ana Ramírez González, about the kid versions of her aunt and mother organizing their community. Both New York Times best-selling books came out in the last year and most likely served as inspiration for Phenomenal Book Club.

Meena’s company started in 2017 as Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a community-oriented organization focused on social causes mainly through message shirts. Top campaigns include the #PhenomenalVoter campaign to encourage voters to exercise their right in the 2018 midterm elections to the Justice for Breonna Taylor last year that manufactured shirts saying “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”

So far, the merch maker’s interaction with over 1,000 celebrities, athletes, and activists has catapulted it into a multimedia venture that also includes Phenomenal Productions that’s described as having “a specific emphasis on communities of color and underrepresented voting blocs.”

Curating books for children

The mother of two daughters, Meena has voiced her opinion that anti-racism works need to be incorporated into children’s libraries through their parents since schools on average have failed to add these works to their curricula. She wrote in The Washington Post op-ed published Nov. 15:

Of course, for Black and Brown parents, this isn’t exactly a revolutionary concept. Many of us have already taken it upon ourselves to give our children the full, accurate history lesson we know they must hear — just as our parents did for us, and their parents for them. But it’s time all American families start taking time at home to discuss the injustices that shaped our nation’s past, the work still to be done in our present, and the values that should define our future.

The new book club will announce selections quarterly and highlight a book already published between those selections. One of the missions of the book club is to aid the publishing industry in upholding its commitments to anti-racism and equity after the George Floyd protests.

Community chats last week were featured on the book club’s Instagram for its first highlight, Severance by Ling Ma, and promoting a giveaway on social media for 50 editions. For the holidays, Phenomenal is selling sweatshirts with a reproductive rights message and cookbooks by women of color.

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Book Review: ‘Unfinished’ by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Unfinished: A Memoir by Priyanka Chopra

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

Unfinished by Priyanka Chopra Jonas is a memoir that delivers insight on the global star’s upbringing before and after fame in the U.S. and India.

Priyanka’s story starts in India where she is a regular seven-year-old, the daughter of military doctors. Naturally when her younger brother is born, she acts out with another sibling in the house. That leads to her being sent to boarding school, where, after the abandonment subsides, she learns how to live independently with her classmates and with decorum. The opportunity eventually leads to going to high school in the Midwest then New York with her aunt and cousins. She gets her first taste of American culture, which of course comes with bullying over her skin color and race. Americanized, she returns to India for her final year of high school, where she exchanges her midriff-baring style for tunics and pants. Now her brother doesn’t want her in the house and sends her photo to be in the Miss India competition.

She prepares for the unpreparable: representing a country that wins global beauty pageants on a regular basis. Without formal knowledge, she and her family string together whatever they can to help her learn to compete on the national level with other young, smart, beautiful women. Her dedication leads to her being crowned with the intention to represent India at the Miss Universe pageant. Though she flubs the final question, she still wins the pageant, securing India back-to-back wins. Since Bollywood film projects want a pageant queen, the woman who had aeronautical engineering goals is now blinded by the entertainment industry that eventually takes her abroad to her leading role in ABC’s Quantico.

Her family is an important part of the story. She is close to her parents who are portrayed as loving and supportive; she even acknowledges that her parents may be more unique than others. A series of botched surgeries to treat cancer takes the life of her father, and she expresses the toll of the grief of seeing her father suffer then recover then suffer again. She also describes the close relationships to her aunts, uncles, and cousins, and how it’s their culture to take care of each other, which affords her the opportunity to go to high school in the U.S. Her marriage years later to pop star Nick Jonas, ten years her junior, is told, where she explains how their courtship just happens naturally and results in a quick, extravagant wedding.

Her Western fame that includes simulating sex scenes sparks backlash in her home country. An insensitive terrorist storyline involving Pakistan on Quantico puts her in the line of the fire again. When she first entered the U.S. entertainment scene as a singer, a gig with the NFL reignites the racism she dealt with in high school. She is accused of getting a nose job when a sinus surgery goes wrong that leads to multiple surgeries fixing the bridge of her nose. The constant criticism motivates her to tackle it head-on, she says, pointing out the hurt of being in the public eye while living out her wildest dreams.

Overall, it’s a celebrity memoir that feels like it’s missing some depth, but learning about the international star and her rise on another continent is interesting as so is learning about her experiences in the U.S. as a teen from India and how that prepared her for the global pageant scene and her acting career.



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Book Review: ‘The Pursuit of Porsha’ by Porsha Williams

The Pursuit of Porsha: How I Grew Into My Power and Purpose by Porsha Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

The Pursuit of Porsha by Porsha Williams takes us on the journey of what made one of the most popular real housewives who she is.

Entrapment in abusive and toxic relationships with men seems to be the main traumatic point of The Real Housewives of Atlanta star’s story from how her father treated her before his untimely death to how her ex-husband treated her behind the cameras.

Atlanta born and raised, Porsha Williams starts her story on how she always envisioned herself in front of the camera as a way to escape her lingering depression and suicidal thoughts. Growing up, she lives with her mother Ms. Diane, a familiar face on the reality show, and her older brother Hosea. Her father also named Hosea like her grandfather, the civil rights activist who worked alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., lives with his second wife and other family. Whenever Porsha and her brother visits their father, sometimes their father punishes them by forcing them into a basement or another room. Though she says the door would never be locked, Porsha feels like she can’t move. On one occasion, she tells her stepmother that her father has a girlfriend since her father would take her when he’d hang out with the girlfriend. This results in a punishment where she’s left in the car for hours. She says her father would forget he’s punishing her and her siblings, but that frozen feeling stays with her in future relationships with men.

When you’re that young, watching the man you love with your entire miniature heart give his love to someone other than your mom, it changes how you think about love and what you expect from it. It changes what you think is up and what you think is down, and suddenly life seems a bit more sideways.

The entrapment follows her when she becomes involved with the recently convicted sex trafficker R. Kelly. After being recruited from a nightclub, Porsha hops on the plane to the R&B singer’s Illinois estate for what she thinks is a recording session. Like the victims’ testimonies in the docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, Porsha describes being sold the falsehood of a singing career to becoming romantically involved with the manipulative man. He, too, leaves her trapped in bedrooms, where she’s not given food or water as a result of him forgetting about her.

Besides physical entrapment, Porsha discusses the highs and mostly lows of her two-year marriage to former footballer Kordell Stewart. Their relationship is first documented on the fifth season of RHOA, Porsha’s debut season. In her memoir, Porsha admits the TV opportunity appeals to her as a way to make her husband proud. A daycare center owner at 24-years-old, Porsha is convinced to let go of her business and be a housewife. But, she says, everything she does is never enough for her husband as their marriage falls apart for millions of viewers to see.

I thought the cameras would be a good distraction from the very real problems we were facing in our marriage, but they weren’t distracting at all. If anything, they magnified the façade we had built brick by unsteady brick.

Porsha relives her first season, realizing everything she says will be scrutinized to the max. Some famous slip-of-the-tongue remarks had viewers questioning her intelligence, and Porsha says she felt ashamed by her honest mistakes, especially while representing her family with civil rights advocacy roots.

After nine years on the show, Porsha has since left the Bravo series and now wears the title of civil rights activist in her own right. She documents in the book her journey from attending protests with her grandfather at six-years-old and witnessing racism firsthand to taking charge at the George Floyd protests last year that soon involved countless other Black people who had lost their lives to racist violence. She’s been tear gassed and arrested on her new crusade, but she says the strength she musters to go out and fight comes from protecting her baby daughter Pilar.

My daughter saved my life. I’ve dealt with depression on and off my entire life. I’ve never been clinically diagnosed, but I know what depression looks like. I know what it feels like. It’s almost like a wave drifting on the shore; I can see it out near the horizon, steadily coming toward me until it overtakes me and I have no choice but to give in to it.

Mental health is a topic that hits readers in the first several pages as a young Porsha says she has unexplainable suicidal thoughts and is taken to a therapist by her mother to discuss her feelings. She recounts a suicidal attempt as a preteen due to feeling out of place at school. The childhood depression evolves with her as she struggles to find relationships she can trust. Porsha emphasizes the pursuit of herself as discovering her self-worth and taking responsibility for her actions.

The toxic relationships with men dominate the book. In the audiobook version of the memoir, Porsha’s younger half-sister Lauren, who also appears on the reality show, takes the reins for two chapters describing some of the difficult relationships. In those situations, Porsha also narrates her uneasy path to motherhood from having an abortion to experiencing infertility due to fibroids. She says the men, who seem loving to her at first, flip on her into unrecognizable monsters, a recurring theme.

Overall, the book gives us a front row seat to Porsha’s World with her longing to be a star to her actually becoming a star amid the obstacles that forced her to recognize her self-worth.

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Book Review: ‘Hooked’ by Sutton Foster

Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life by Sutton Foster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

Hooked by Sutton Foster dives deep into the Broadway and TV star’s poignant moments punctuated by her love for crafting and how it helped her stay sane.

Known for her head-turning Broadway starring roles and her turn in sexy bookish TV series Younger where she plays a 40-something passing as a millennial, Sutton Foster has written a memoir about her rise in entertainment and how crocheting helped along the way. Growing up in the South then the Midwest, she moved often with her family that included her older brother Hunter, also a Broadway veteran; their agoraphobic mother, and their father who seemed to be under the thumb of his wife’s undiagnosed mental health condition. Though her mother doesn’t want to face society, Sutton and her brother are placed in youth theater to exercise their energy. They fall in love with the theater, and we go on the adventure of seeing Sutton evolve into a professional actor at seventeen. She goes on her first tour in her senior year of high school for a musical, where she grows homesick amid battling catty girls who despise her energy. After dropping out of Carnegie Mellon, she finds herself lost trying to figure out her next step, so she journals and crochets. She eventually returns to her theater work where her risk of being the understudy of the Broadway run of Thoroughly Modern Millie leads to her becoming the lead and winning her first Tony Award.

The crafting is threaded throughout her story. She describes some of her hardest moments and how crafting became therapy. A chunk of her latter story surrounds her fertility hardships. While deciding on adoption, she is honest about the anxiety of becoming her mother and not becoming a mother in case the birth mother decides to keep the baby. All those swirling emotions motivates her to sew a blanket for her potential daughter. She stops at one point when she hears a friend fails to secure the baby she intended to adopt; crocheting the blanket when her adoption is up in the air is too much to bear.

Another underlying theme of the memoir is Sutton’s relationship with her mother. She learns crafting from her mother, recalling a stitched Strawberry Shortcake bookmark she received.

That was during the peak of my obsession with the red-haired cartoon character. I had coloring books, figurines, and even a garbage pail, all store-bought. I find it so moving that my mother took the time to meticulously stitch that sweet girl in her poufy pink bonnet and white frilly apron into existence. She added my first and last name in red thread and a row of hearts in pink and green, then finished the piece with a calico border. I don’t recall my mother saying “I love you” often. But I do know that she poured her love for me into that bookmark.

The palpable pain jumps through the author’s voice and on the pages of the book of how she had a difficult relationship with her mother and how that impacted the entire family dynamic and followed her onstage. She talks about how her mother only saw her once on Broadway while her high school drama teacher flew to see her perform on several occasions. Her mother didn’t acknowledge her brother’s eventual wife or talk to her brother for years because the couple had lived together before marriage “in sin.” After her mother’s death, Sutton soon starts her own family in fear she will become the mother she had. She also witnesses her father coming out of his unintended shell and living the life he always wanted.

Overall, the crafty memoir hits the emotional nerve mostly with the author’s relationship with the stage and the family she loves. The crocheting adventures and recipes seem to be a bit detached from the story. This is really a story of following your dreams. Sutton even has a few run-ins with her idol, Broadway and TV actress Patti LuPone, and conducts an interview featured in the book. So while you may want to head to your local craft store and learn to crochet to reduce anxiety like the author, you’ll connect more with her inspirational backstory.

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Book Review: ‘Bamboozled by Jesus’ by Yvonne Orji

Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me into the Life of My Dreams by Yvonne Orji

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

Bamboozled by Jesus by Yvonne Orji is a comedic memoir designed for the reader to recognize the little miracles that help you on your path.

The star of HBO’s Insecure, Yvonne Orji takes her love for Jesus Christ to new heights by sharing some of her profound moments that led her to Hollywood from growing up in suburban Maryland to Nigerian parents. She shares the wisdom she obtained from these minor and major blessings and how they kept her motivated to reach her dreams.

Being bamboozled by Jesus is low-key, the most frustratingly amazing thing you’ll ever experience. It ain’t always sexy, but it is always worth it. But don’t feel bad for wanting to tap out midway through. Even Jesus looked for an exit strategy. He straight up asked God, If there be any other way, let this cup pass me by. In other words, Fam, this ain’t it!

Her dreams of becoming a doctor are shaped by her parents’ medical careers but watching her aunt recover from an ectopic pregnancy motivated her even more. Until she fails organic chemistry in college. Yet college is also the place she realizes she isn’t as connected with Jesus the way she thought she was being raised Catholic. This stabilizes her religious path, where she famously promises to stay a virgin until marriage. Though she knew being a doctor was not in the cards, she still pursues a career in public health, which takes her to Africa for work. When she returns to the U.S., she is determined to break into entertainment with a move to New York City then to Los Angeles, where in both places she receives shelter and transportation from friends and acquaintances practically free of cost. She wins small screenwriting and stand-up comedy gigs that grow in momentum and leads to a tryout for her breakout role as Molly on Insecure.

The author’s religious schtick is sometimes entertaining and sometimes perplexing. Amid describing her transitions, she recounts Bible stories, more in a ratchet retelling that has you questioning if that’s what you read in the holy book or what she calls Da Good Book. But she’s trying to be funny and relate it to modern times, so it’s hard to fault her with that attempt. When she auditions for Insecure, she prays for the role but worries her prayers will clash with other actresses’ prayers since they too were Christian. But is it Christian to pray for others to be eliminated from the competition?

The cultural references take a backseat to the religious theme. Though she says she’s leaning into her “Nigerianness,” it would’ve been nice to get more of a setting of her upbringing in the U.S. juxtaposed with her family annual trips to Nigeria. And she makes a few wisecracks toward Ghana, which may be taken as funny or offensive depending on your ethnicity.

Overall, the book’s inspirational message gets tangled in the repackaged biblical stories and random references to drive her point home like that blurb about basketball player Jeremy Lin’s Linsanity phase. The concept is interesting, but it comes off as overdone in this case where the reader has to stay on their toes but may have lost the depth of the content. The book may be more enjoyable if you know your holy book stories à la the Bible versions and your pop cultural references to understand how the small steps lead to the bigger picture.

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Book Review: ‘You Got Anything Stronger?’ by Gabrielle Union

You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories by Gabrielle Union

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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You Got Anything Stronger? by Gabrielle Union picks up right where we leave off from her first autobiographical story collection and takes us on her adventure of learning from life’s most impactful moments.

Her 2017 memoir We’re Going to Need More Wine made headlines with the author’s admission of losing count of her numerous miscarriages. The second book begins with her fertility struggles and her decision to choose surrogacy. She takes us down the journey of selecting the right surrogate mother and how many women look for a surrogate by targeting Black and Brown women’s wombs to house their fetuses, which informs her decision of who will be the best vessel for her daughter Kaavia James.

The chapter highlights her continuous fertility struggles, including her adenomyosis diagnosis that comes after her in vitro fertilization attempts never worked successfully. And she addresses the hardship of trying to get pregnant while her basketballer husband Dwyane Wade had a baby with another woman during a time she calls a bad place in their relationship before marriage. She talks about the pain of not birthing a child as her partner can conceive a child—a topic she says she didn’t feel comfortable discussing in her previous book. We also revisit her rape in college when she was working at a Payless ShoeSource by following the aftermath and healing process as she stays glued to watching the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona.

Surprisingly, one of the poignant chapters is a heartfelt letter dedicated to Isis, Gabrielle’s pivotal character in the 2000 cheerleader flick Bring It On. Isis leads the East Compton Clovers to victory after finding out the Rancho Carne Toros led by Kirsten Dunst’s character Torrance have copied the all-Black cheerleading team’s moves for years. The actress goes into the awkwardness of being the only Black person at the audition rehearsing stereotypical slang. Once she nabs the role along with Clover characters named Jenelope, Lava, and LaFred, played by the R&B girl group Blaque, Gabrielle finds herself every day editing the script to subtract the slang she knows wouldn’t come out of Isis’ mouth. She even reveals how she worked out a storyline for Isis to go to a top university, but it didn’t make the cut. Twenty years later, Isis is a mainstay on the top movie villains lists every year, a downer for Gabrielle who felt she let down Black teen girls by not making sure Isis deserved role model status. This motivates her to become a better role model for her daughters Kaavia and Zaya.

Her relationships with her daughters are interlaced in the stories. While she talks about her journey to mothering Kaavia, she also talks about her journey in understanding Zaya’s gender and sexual identity. She is a supportive stepmother with going to the school administrations whenever the family moves due to Dwyane’s basketball career to explain Zaya’s preferences. Those preferences evolve until Zaya realizes she is a transgender girl. And with that evolution comes the family’s evolution in creating a safe space for Zaya and asking others to do the same.

Stories with heartache sit between comedic chapters like when Gabrielle takes a laxative before going to the strip club that turns into a night in the strippers’ dressing room with a cold compress on her forehead to when her younger sister gets drunk off frozen limoncello at Thanksgiving that Gabrielle made after seeing Danny DeVito blame his televised drunkenness on the alcohol.

Overall, the memoir is another well-written collection of stories from different times and themes throughout the author’s life. Via the audiobook, her voice comes alive with the storytelling and the brilliant choice of words.



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what's lit

Tamron Hall’s New Novel ‘As the Wicked Watch’ Taps Into Her Crime Reporter Experience

TAMRON HALL - 9/29/21 - "Tamron Hall," airs weekdays in syndication on ABC. (ABC/Jeff Neira) TAMRON HALL

Talk show host Tamron Hall has the book of the week with her debut novel about a crime journalist seeking justice for Black female victims of a serial killer.

As The Wicked Watch, published by HarperCollins’ William Morrow and Company imprint, is the first of a series in which Tamron said she plans to write six books.

“For Jordan, she is a much braver reporter than I was at the beginning of my career,” she said at the National Black Book Festival recently held live on Facebook in conversation with author Rhonda M. Lawson. “First of all, she has a background that I don’t have; she is a forensic scientist who has found herself tapped to be a reporter… I wanted to created this protagonist who had this level of expertise that’s not often seen in thrillers.”

The book centers on Jordan Manning who arrives at a Chicago news station with her eye on the anchor chair. Jordan’s forensic science background blended with her journalistic prowess motivates her to cover murder victims, particularly Black women. But when she comes across the case of a Black girl abandoned in a parking lot, the lack of coverage elsewhere and the collective amnesia drives Jordan to seek who is responsible for the girl’s murder.

Timing of the novel’s release this week coincides with the national discussion around missing and murdered women of color falling out of the media spotlight. The conversation was sparked by the death of White blogger Gabby Petito that dominated headlines over the last month.

Pulling from her real-life experience as not only a reporter but also as the sister of a murder victim, Tamron said she wished she exhibited the boldness of her main character.

“She’s able to call things out in the newsroom and call out things when she goes in, for example, what appears to be a crime scene from this perspective,” Tamron said of Jordan at the book festival. “She also recognizes through something that happened to her in her past the sensitivity that family members of victims deserves. And in this case, she befriends a mother who is looking for justice and she does cross lines between what is the lane a reporter should occupy versus what is the lane a human should occupy.”

Covering crime impacts Jordan’s relationships and love life and stimulates distrust with others, Tamron said, also adding that a reporter’s support system and mental health may not be stable while they’re working on traumatic stories. The National Association of Black Journalists provides resources to Black journalists coping with everyday stressors inside and outside the newsroom.

Since the book festival mainly serves self-published Black authors, Tamron said she would like to highlight more of this population who wouldn’t be recognized in mainstream media. She also acknowledged that her ties with her talent agent who connected her to a literary agent then a publisher is a privilege many authors of color do not have.

“Like in any industry, I believe we are underrepresented on the agent level; I don’t see a lot of Black book agents,” she said, adding she is a newbie still navigating the publishing industry. “You have to have advocates in the room, and we need more advocates of power whether they are agents or publishers in the rooms to make sure Black content creators, Black writers are represented.”

Tamron is also planning a children’s book inspired by her infant son Moses.

The second book in the Jordan Manning series is in the works, she said.

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what's lit

‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ Stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid Talk Writing Life

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air co-stars Karyn Parsons and Daphne Maxwell Reid spent Saturday talking about their literary ventures at the National Black Book Festival on Facebook Live.

Known for playing the iconic wealthy Black girl Hilary Banks on the hit ’90s NBC sitcom, Karyn has enjoyed a second career as a novelist and biographer managing a nonprofit geared toward bringing Black stories to life for kids. Daphne played the second rendition of Hilary’s mother, Vivian Banks, also known as Aunt Viv to star Will Smith’s character. She also mentioned her self-publishing experience.

Karyn, the founder and president of Sweet Blackberry Foundation focused on literary education, discussed her 2019 debut novel How High the Moon, a middle grade historical fiction novel set in the Jim Crow South.

“My mother grew up in Charleston, and she always talked about how happy her childhood was, how great everything was,” Karyn said during the panel. “Always a positive light. It took many years when it finally dawned on me the time that she grew up in and the location. So I started asking more questions.”

After pushing for more information, she said her mother grew up in a small town outside Charleston, South Carolina. The idea of the book came from her imagining if she grew up in the same location in the 1940s as a preteen Black girl. She added she was able to weave into the novel the true story of George Stinney Jr., a Black 14-year-old boy who was convicted and put to death in nearby Alcolu for allegedly murdering two White girls. He was exonerated in 2014, 70 years after his execution.

Along with the release of How High the Moon, Karyn also wrote a new children’s book titled Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie. It will be released in December.

The publisher of both books is Little, Brown Young Readers under the Hachette Book Group.

“I was just writing all day now that I didn’t have a show,” Karyn said about her writing hobby blossoming post-Fresh Prince. “I guess I was always writing, but I never thought of myself as a writer because I always thought of myself as an actor.” She added that a friend she had met after her famous TV role had become a literary agent and convinced her to write a novel to complement her work with Sweet Blackberry.

Her passion to bring Bessie Coleman, the first African American female licensed aviator, started with a Kickstarter project for an animated short that debuted last year at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.

Daphne, who has self-published four photography books and a cookbook, said she’s working on her memoir.

“I’m still not a writer; I compile,” Daphne said. “What I started doing was taking photographs. I started this photographic journey, and from this journey, I was talking about the prints that I was making and what the relationship of the prints had to life. I was doing presentations before groups and talking a lot about the experience of taking the pictures. And finally I said, ‘I keep repeating the same thing over and over again,’ so let me write it down.”

Her photography books focus on doors from all over the world. “I was trying to encourage people to look at the details in their life. That was my main focus, so I wrote.”

Though she took the self-publishing route, Daphne said she may look for an agent for the memoir she’s working on.

The two actresses are not the only ones from the Fresh Prince world to become authors. Show producer and writer Maiya Williams, whose name also appears in the iconic green graffiti font in the intro, also became a middle grade author.

Karyn and Daphne can be seen on TV again with the Fresh Prince reunion airing Thanksgiving weekend on HBO Max.

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what's lit

Rachel True Shares Her Tarot Journey in New Guidebook and Memoir

Rachel True, the unforgettable star of teen witch cult classic The Craft and weed cult classic Half Baked, has released a tarot-reading guidebook accompanied with personal essays and tarot cards she helped design.

Appearing with another well-known hippie “mixed chick” actress Cree Summer, Rachel discussed her new book set True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Guidebook and Deck on Crowdcast with Los Angeles indie bookstore Book Soup. Approximately 450 attendees remained online throughout the hour-and-a-half webinar.

On her website, she describes the book and card set as “22 memoir essays from my Mixed Black Jewish chick’s mystic minded Hollywood life” that includes 22 major arcana cards. She said the set gives lessons to readers just learning about tarot or wanting to expand their knowledge of tarot.

A set of 78 cards, tarot involves the practice of reading tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by asking questions then interpreting cards. Arcana is defined as “mysterious or specialized knowledge, language, or information accessible or possessed only by the initiate,” according to Merriam Webster. The major arcana cards in a tarot deck represents big themes and changes at play in your current, past and future life. The minor arcana cards represent the current day-to-day aspects that affect making decisions.

Wearing her signature turquoise butterfly necklace, Rachel described in the webinar how she became an occultist, in this case a tarot reader, as a child. She said between the ages of four and five, she would access her parents’ bookcase and pull out Beyond Good and Evil by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

“When a few years later, when one of my parents’ friends gave me a deck, I was like, ‘Oh, I know these. Wait, er,'” she said. “It kind of connected with me and related back to those two books because some of them, especially Man and His Symbols, had some images in black and white and some images that are on the tarot cards. And that’s how I really began getting into tarot.”

Rachel and Cree, who admitted she really got into tarot practice only in the past two years, said that tarot doesn’t align with any religion, so it shouldn’t be seen as devilish. Even if you get The Devil card, which could mean sins such as greed may be overtaking one’s attention.

“Black people and ethnic people quite often went to the soothsayer or the card reader in the neighborhood because they didn’t go to doctors and we didn’t have shrinks, so this is a long tradition here,” Rachel said, calling the practice a “shrink in a box and spiritual Xanax.”

Released Tuesday, the book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with illustrations by Stephanie Singleton. Rachel dedicated the book to Pamela Colman Smith, a key person in the early tarot movement when she illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck in 1909 for fellow British mystic and writer Arthur Edward Waite which became known as a standard. Rachel and Cree, who both identify as biracial calling their mothers dark-skinned Black women and their fathers White men, said Pamela’s story got buried in history as a biracial woman.

From 2002 to 2006, Rachel starred in the UPN sitcom Half & Half, which started streaming on Netflix on Thursday.

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music reviews

Reading a Singer’s Memoir? Choose the Audiobook

Mariah Carey is the latest singer to tell her life story in a book that will be formatted into an audiobook she narrates. With singers using their actual voices in their memoirs, the audiobook has become the best format in this booming genre.

Last week, the five-octave diva revealed the title of her memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. The book will be coming out via Henry Holt & Company’s Andy Cohen Books in the U.S., Pan Macmillan in the U.K., and Audible. The release date is Sept. 29 with Michaela Angela Davis, a well-known Black culture insider, as the co-writer.

 

The next day, as fans chimed on social media about the fate of an audiobook, Mariah confirmed her memoir will be in an audio format, linking to the Audible pre-order page. On Friday, in celebration of the 30th year of her career, she released a new album featuring one of her first concerts at the Tatou Club in New York during her 1990 debut.

Between new music and the audiobook, songstress memoirs are more entertaining to read, as evidenced by Jessica Simpson and Alicia Keys, the other major female artists who also released memoirs this year.

In Harper Collins’ Open Book, Jessica’s voice not only breaks with emotion at the emotional parts, but it also includes six new songs she wrote while writing the book. Her new music is still not available on streaming services as an exclusive for audiobook readers.

More Myself from Macmillan Audio has Alicia expressly telling her story with every chapter guest-starring family and friends from her mother, husband Swizz Beatz, and even ex-boyfriend and collaborator Kerry “Krucial” Brothers Jr. with of course Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and Jay-Z. She also has spurts of singing to describe how albums or singles came together.

Jessica and Alicia have been promoting their books the best way they can amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but with cases rising in many states, even Mariah may have to deal with the same fate of not meeting fans in public who want their books signed, or their audiobook covers.

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what's lit

Singer Amerie Kicks Off New Book Club With ‘The Water Dancer’

Amerie announces her new book club / Instagram

Amerie, best known for her 2000s R&B singles Why Don’t We Fall In Love? and 1 Thing, announced on YouTube she will be launching her new social media book club with making The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates this month’s inaugural pick.

Over the past few years, Amerie has been reinventing herself as a literary talent with her video book, beauty, and lifestyle blog. She contributed to the forthcoming black girl magic anthology, A Phoenix First Must Burn, that’s being called “Beyoncé’s Lemonade for a teen audience.” Her editing credits include another young adult anthology, Because You Love To Hate Me, and she has plans in the works to release a debut novel. She made a surprise return to music last year with the twin albums, 4AM Mulholland and After 4AM.

“For so long, I know you’ve been wanting the book club, and I’ve been reading the comments, but I didn’t know how I exactly want to do it and I believe I figured it out,” Amerie said in her announcement video.

She said her book club will “feature books by authors sent to us an array of different perspectives, voices, and I hope we can come together and learn from each other, listen to one another, also be heard, and embrace and celebrate our differences, and come away from the whole thing somewhat changed.”

Instagram and YouTube will be the main outlets for the book club conversation. The selections will be announced on the first Wednesday of the month with reminders throughout the month and final conversations at the end of the month.

Oprah’s Book Club famously chose The Water Dancer as its first pick in its Apple-backed reincarnation.

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music reviews what's lit

Mariah Carey Talks Forthcoming Memoir, Writing Songs With Women

Mariah Carey constantly touted her memoir in an in-depth interview with Variety as the entertainment publication honored the songstress in its Power of Women edition.

When asked about the events that had led up to her 2001 “emotional and physical breakdown” coinciding with poor reviews of her debut film Glitter and her inherent love for Christmas that spawned a forever holiday hit and album, Mariah said: “All of this to be revealed in the book, by the way, which I’m obsessed with writing right now. It’s so cathartic.”

With the special edition focused on women, Mariah discussed the role of women in her career, especially in the beginning where she felt there weren’t enough young female artists like her as she was surrounded by a lot of men in the music industry. To stay on top of the ambitious career of her dreams, she said she learned how to play the game.

“It’s sad that we’re still playing games at this point,” she said in the video interview. She then hinted at sexual harassment and the current #MeToo landscape. “And as a woman, yeah, I’ve been in situations where I’m looking at stuff now going, ‘Omigod, this happened to me, that happened to me.’ I totally relate to this woman’s experience, but I didn’t necessarily go along with it in a complete way, but I was like, ‘Oh, this person just like tried to have a moment with me’—without being too specific—in the studio, in the dark. Thank God, I was like, ‘Ha ha ha ha,’ and laughed my way out of it. That’s just my mechanism that I turn on. So these things have happened to me, yeah, but I really respect the women who have come forward and paved the way, so that the newer generation of women don’t have to deal with this and know they don’t have to deal with it.”

She said she felt isolated coming up in the industry, where her eponymous album came out in 1990 when she was 20 years old. Now, with more female artists in the game across the age spectrum, she said she finds ways to work with them.

“I love writing with other women, and it’s something that’s newer thing for me. People like Bibi Bourelly and Priscilla Renea, like new young writers I really enjoy working with because it’s a different energy and they may or may not have been inspired by me, and I thrive on it. Even some of my favorite songs on Butterfly, which is one of my favorite albums and it represents coming into a new era in my life and finding my own freedom as a woman. I remember one of the sessions was with Missy Elliott. We just had the best time working together and writing together.”

Mariah also goes into how the media compared her with Whitney Houston.

“What has to change in our industry the most is the pitting of women against each other. There was the situation when I started, ‘Oh, her and Whitney. Let’s put them against each other’ and blah blah. We didn’t know each other, and she was one of the greatest of all time. Then we finally did a duet together that won an Oscar. We had the best time working together. It was female camaraderie. We both got it. We’re both like, ‘She doesn’t hate me.’ We’re actually having this great time together and laughing. And this is the most fun I have ever had working alone ever. I think camaraderie with women you respect is a huge deal.”

The Mixed-ish theme singer and songwriter said her book will begin with her humble beginnings as a biracial child in New York and follow the highs and lows of her record-breaking career. Explaining she had recently extended her memoir, Mariah said to look for it in the latter half of 2020.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘From Scratch’ by Tembi Locke

“From Scratch” is a beautifully written memoir showing the elements of grief when dealing with the loss of a spouse while nurturing the delicate relationships with that spouse’s homeland, culture, and family.

Tembi is studying abroad in Italy when she meets Sicilian native Saro after he tries to help her get her stolen bike back. There’s instant chemistry between them. Tembi, who returns to the U.S. to finish her studies, keeps a long-distance relationship with Saro, who’s in his 30s and ready to become a chef. They convene in New York City later where they marry as Tembi builds up her acting career on Broadway. Her career then takes her away from the stage to the silver screen in Hollywood. Saro follows and begins his culinary career in Los Angeles. They’re living an ideal life until they want children. Biologically, they are having trouble conceiving, so they soon adopt Zoela. During the adoption decision, they learn Saro has liver cancer. Though he’s in and out of remission for years, he succumbs to the disease when Zoela is 7 years old. The overwhelming loss hits Tembi as she has to deal with matters such as distributing Saro’s ashes – some interred in LA and the rest she takes to Sicily. Saro’s parents never approved of their son marrying an American black woman, so in Siciliy Tembi is also still in relationship-building mode with her in-laws with her young daughter in tow. Tembi and Zoela feel a stronger sense of family in Sicily as they bond with Saro’s aging mother and realistically make plans in time of her impending death.

The way this memoir is written is extraordinary with detail, including the details of Tembi handling her husband’s cancer treatment, their adoption process, her husband’s death, and her obsession to make sure she grieves healthily with her daughter. She talks about the moments when she misses her husband the most like picking fava beans in their garden in the Silver Lake neighborhood in LA, creating meals with Saro’s favorite utensils and pots. The memoir also shines a spotlight on how stressful a loved one’s death can be with all the checklists and how one person may bear most of the burden of crossing everything off. On audiobook, Tembi reads her story perfectly.