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‘And Just Like That…’ Shows How Recording an Audiobook Is Part of Grieving Process

Sarah Jessica Parker in "And Just Like That..."
Sarah Jessica Parker in "And Just Like That..." Photo: Craig Blakenhorn/Max

⚠️ Spoilers ahead! Watch the series on Max.

The Sex and the City reboot centers its second season’s third episode on Carrie Bradshaw narrating her story of grief for her audiobook. As she bumbles with emotion over the chapter detailing her husband’s untimely death, Carrie does everything in her power to avoid having to complete the narration. 

And Just Like That… returned for its second season June 22 on Max, formerly HBO Max, and picked up where the first season left off: Carrie moving forward after the sudden death of her husband, John, better known as “Big.” The grief connects to her writing in the episode “Chapter Three.”

Traipsing around Manhattan in her iconic heels, Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is heading to the studio to record her latest book, Loved and Lost. This book fits into a different genre compared to her other books. This one is about her journey of grief after the death of Big, played by Chris Noth (Sexual assault allegations against the actor emerged immediately after his character’s demise. He denies the allegations and hasn’t been criminally charged).

Carrie’s foray into the grief memoir genre has given her an opportunity to narrate her audiobook. Most memoirists tell their stories for the audiobook, and it’s become more of a standard for memoirs about grief. But when Carrie speaks into the microphone, she keeps choking on her words, reliving the moments from the premiere episode of the series where Big dies from a heart attack after riding on his Peloton (The fitness company’s stock fell due to the negative storyline). Carrie’s male audio producers try to coach her through the annunciation issues, like she’s swallowing her t’s and popping her p’s, but they can’t pick up her frustration in reliving that distinct memory by reading it aloud. 

“A memoir this personal needs to be read by the author,” her editor says after Carrie urges for an actress to be hired to record the audiobook, like Julianne Moore or Julianna Margulies. Then Carrie learns that the studio has been booked for five days. She thought it would be only for two. But the publisher already factored in extra days to accommodate the emotional hardship of reading the story. Back in the recording studio, Carrie starts to hear the water from the shower on that tragic day and sees water blurring the words on the e-book she’s reading from. The audio producers decide it’s better to skip the chapter for the time being. 

After a tearful moment in the recording studio, Carrie receives advice from Bitsy Von Muffling, played by Julie Halston. Complaining about the upkeep after a facelift, fellow widow Bitsy recommends Carrie should do whatever she loves to do to make her feel better. So, Carrie goes shoe shopping. She bursts through her apartment door with Bergdorf Goodman bags filled with shoes, such as a pair of pink Gucci ankle-cuff leather pumps and copper-studded Giuseppe Zanotti Intriigo mules.

While trying on her new shoes, she calls up the main audio producer and tells him she has contracted COVID-19. Therefore, the producers need to hire that actress Carrie had suggested earlier. The viral disease that caused a yearslong global pandemic is now treatable enough that it can be a lie to get out of work. She stays in her apartment, even enjoying a hamburger and fries when her friends Seema and Anthony, played by Sarita Choudhury and Mario Cantone respectively, call her for lunch. She lies to them about her fake COVID. Seema comes to visit where Carrie admits her lie and tells her how she needs to attend her neighbor Lisette’s jewelry showcase. 

At the showcase, Carrie and Seema are chatting when they see a man in a black suit pocket the jewelry on display. While they’re questioning the theft, Carrie yells that she has COVID, which clears the outside tents. Seema brandishes a handgun, which turns out to be a lighter. The jewelry is gone, and Lisette, played by Katerina Tannenbaum, is devastated. Carrie visits Lisette the next day with pastries as they mourn the loss. Mourning, even for material objects, helps Carrie prepare to narrate the chapter detailing her husband’s death in the recording studio. She celebrates with Seema, who has recovered her Birkin handbag stolen in the beginning of the episode, at a communal table with young men visiting from Australia. At the end of the episode, Carrie’s lie manifests into real COVID. 

Though the writing in the reboot fails to be as crisp as the writing in the original Sex and the City series based on Candace Bushnell’s 1996 book, emphasizing the hardship of narrating an audiobook about grief seems to be a realistic issue memoirists deal with.

Marketing maven Bozoma St. John, for example, went on tour earlier this year to discuss her grief memoir The Urgent Life: My Story of Love, Loss, and Survival. In the very first minutes on her audiobook, she narrates the day her husband died from a rare cancer thought to be treatable. Tembi Locke’s 2019 memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home came to life onscreen with a Netflix miniseries. She narrates the story of losing her husband to cancer elegantly for the audiobook edition. You can find the book review here.

On the other hand, Sheryl Sandberg didn’t narrate the audiobook for Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, her 2017 memoir about losing her husband, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg. She may have been worried about being overtaken with emotion, or the publisher decided her voice wasn’t the right fit, even when more memoirists are reading their life stories. Elisa Donovan of Clueless and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch fame stepped in to narrate the Option B audiobook. In fact, the actress narrated the 2021 audiobook for her own grief memoir about losing her father in Wake Me When You Leave: Love and Encouragement via Dreams from the Other Side. 

This a rare episode for Carrie where we see the process of her promoting her book. This is a newer process for some authors, especially for memoirists, with coming to terms to reading an audiobook, even when it draws up tough feelings. Audiobooks are more popular than ever, so publishers are banking on authors to vocalize their own stories of loss and healing.

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When Diverse Books Don’t Cross Our Paths

SHE LIT: When Diverse Books Don’t Cross Our Paths 🧭

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#CurrentlyReading Wildblood by Lauren Blackwood 🏝️

Book covers of Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider and Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower juxtaposed in a graphic.

What it feels like for a girl in this world with invisible book bans in classrooms

There has been so much fabulous TV to binge in the new year. Are we all watching the same shows? Probably not. But one of the biggest splashes on a streaming service in the past few weeks is Ginny & Georgia on Netflix. This unique series features Ginny, a biracial teenager played by Antonia Gentry who’s troubled by the actions of her beautifully dangerous White mother, Georgia, played by Brianne Howey, who tends to murder people.

The first episode of the second season, which dropped on Netflix on Jan. 5, shows bibliophile Ginny reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower when Georgia walks into her bedroom. (The late Black science fiction author is having a moment on TV right now with the addition of her debut novel Kindred being turned into a FX on Hulu series.) Back to Ginny. Clutching her paperback, she’s having a nightmare, yet the real nightmare has yet to come.

She’s asked by her microaggressive White male AP English teacher to pick a book by a Black author for the class to read. In failed diversity politics in the classroom, the teacher wants Ginny to educate the class about Black literature since she’s the only Black student in the class and she’s the one who wants more inclusivity in the curriculum. After mulling the decision with her Black father Zion, played by Nathan Mitchell, in his jaw-dropping loft apartment in Boston, Ginny decides she will pick a literary masterpiece by a Black author to let her class know that not all masterpieces are written by William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, or Mark Twain.

Ginny selects Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches by the late Black lesbian feminist author about not being understood in a society that ties skin color and gender to humanity. Once introverted Ginny gives a presentation to the class about why she’s choosing Sister Outsider, the teacher then asks her to lead the class discussions on the book. Also known as do his damn job for him — for free. He has zero interest in reading or teaching the book, letting Ginny know she’s still not supported.

This pushes Ginny to the edge, and without giving too much of a spoiler, it opens up the conversation on how teens are not getting a healthy dose of diverse literature in a country still subsisting on book bans and limited curricula in schools.

More middle and high school students are creating their own book clubs to make up for the lost intellectual value. They’re dealing with books being publicly banned from their school libraries, public libraries, and in even some cases, their local bookstores, including chains such as Barnes & Noble.

What about the books that are not actually banned but will never come up on your English syllabus? What about the issue that most people stop reading after they finish schooling because homework isn’t assigned in the real world? What about teachers and professors who are conditioned to the subtractions in their literary knowledge that they don’t evolve to diversify their reading lists?

With conversations swirling around book bans, there needs to be more attention to the invisible book bans like how a book by Audre Lorde is less likely to be read in high school. Personally, I never heard of Audre Lorde until I attended a historically Black college, and I didn’t read Sister Outsider until a few years ago. A lot of us are still making up for the years and years of almost exclusively reading books by White male authors that were assigned to us in school.

Books keep multiplying every year. Our to-be-read lists are drowning with our selections. But there are a thousand books I wish I read in high school instead of so much Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Twain. The catch-up game is real. Most kids who love reading are balancing the school-assigned books with the pleasure books that they see themselves in.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most kids are struggling to recover their social skills again. So reading for fun may not be a top pastime for them. There will be people like Ginny’s teacher who refuse to value literature by authors who are not straight White men and will try to humiliate others for valuing literature from different perspectives.

shelit.com blogger Kibby Araya.
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What we’re highlighting

Meg Medina succeeds Jason Reynolds as youth ambassador

Middle grade novelist Meg Medina has been named the new National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a selection made by the Library of Congress. She is the eighth ambassador and the first Hispanic person to assume the position. Starting this week, she replaces acclaimed young adult and middle grade author Jason Reynolds who held the position since 2020.

“It’s an enormous honor to advocate for the reading and writing lives of our nation’s children and families,” said the author, who identifies as Cuban American, in a statement. “I realize the responsibility is critical, but with the fine examples of previous ambassadors to guide me, I am eager to get started on my vision for this important work.”

Her platform “Cuéntame!: Let’s talk books” will focus on uniting children and families in literary conversations. The name of the campaign is inspired by the phrase Spanish-speaking friends and families use to catch up with one another. Meg’s books include the middle grade novel Merci Suárez Changes Gears. She plans to serve a two-year term.

North Dakota introduces bill to ban ‘sexually explicit’ books

North Dakota is the latest state to examine a bill that promises to eliminate books with alleged “sexually explicit” content from public libraries. House Bill No. 1205 also states a person could be guilty of a class B misdemeanor if they willfully display to a minor “any photograph, book, paperback book, pamphlet, or magazine” that shows “nude or partially denuded human figures posed or presented in a manner to exploit sex, lust, or perversion for commercial gain.”

A class B misdemeanor in North Dakota carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in prison and/or a fine of $1,500. That means a librarian could be charged for shelving a book that falls into this category. People who believe a public library has a book that has said nudity and/or sexual depictions can submit a request to have the book removed from the library. The library then has to remove the book within 30 days.

The bill has so far had a committee meeting. Many librarians and library board members throughout the state have already filed letters in opposition to the new bill, including the ACLU.

Netflix releases ‘Perfect Find’ film photos, expected premiere

Tia Williams’ 2016 novel The Perfect Find is being turned into a film with streaming giant Netflix that released some information this week. Though we still don’t have a set date for the premiere, Netflix announced the film is a part of its summer 2023 slate of new content in a press release (and not in its promo video). The film stars Gabrielle Union as a fashion editor in Manhattan who falls for a guy half her age who happens to be the son of her work frenemy, who will be played by Suits alum Gina Torres.

What we’re reviewing

Actress Gabrielle Union.

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What we’re watching

Zión Moreno in Gossip Girl on HBO Max.

Gossip Girl on HBO Max

The reboot series based on Cecily von Ziegesar’s best-selling novels about girls and guys navigating the elite prep school social scene in New York City has been canceled by HBO’s streamer this week. At the height of the books’ popularity in the mid-aughts, the original series that ran from 2007 to 2012 on the CW became a phenomenon, launching the careers of Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. This newer, more diverse version meant for a Gen Z audience failed to make the same impact. Both seasons are streaming on HBO Max.

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Simon & Schuster Loses Publisher to Book Deal 

<![CDATA[SHE LIT: Simon & Schuster Loses Publisher to Book Deal 📚]]> SHE LIT: Simon & Schuster Loses Publisher to Book Deal 📚

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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.

Film poster for "Where the Crawdads Sing"

The most high-profile Black woman in publishing leaves post to write second book

Simon & Schuster announced this week that its senior vice president and publisher Dana Canedy is leaving the position she’s held for two years.

After her 2008 memoir was turned into a film last year, she says she plans to write a follow-up. But with her hiring coinciding with the racial unrest of 2020 and coming into question in last year’s controversy over the acquisition of former vice president Mike Pence’s memoir, Dana’s departure still feels like a blow to diversity and inclusion in book publishing.

Directed by screen legend Denzel Washington, A Journal for Jordan opened in theaters Christmas Day 2021 starring Michael B. Jordan playing the late U.S. Army First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, Dana’s fiancé who died in 2006 in combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their son, Jordan, was only six months old. Dana’s narration of their relationship and their decision to have a family along with letters from father to son is reflected in A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor published by Penguin Random House’s imprint Crown Publishing Group.

Though Dana hasn’t tweeted much since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, there are a flurry of tweets supporting the film that grossed close to $6.6 million in global box office sales and received bad press for its low performance during a high-volume holiday weekend. The positive feedback contributed to her decision to leave her lofty publishing position to write a follow-up book expected to be released in 2024 under Simon & Schuster.

Dana’s short-lived stint at the top of a major publishing house also came with criticism. When news broke that Simon & Schuster will publish Mike Pence’s memoir, outsiders as well as insiders attacked the move, pushing that Trump administration officials should not have their books published especially when the Jan. 6 insurrection and claims of illegal actions from the onetime administration were still coming to light.

Simon & Schuster at the time, like most publishers, have been trying to add more BIPOC, short for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and LGBTQ+ authors to their rosters. Hence Dana’s appointment. More than 200 members of Simon & Schuster staff members signed a petition calling for the publisher to cancel the seven-figure book deal with the former vice president, The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2021.

“What I don’t want to do is what the industry does. It has to diversify. We need much more range. Through the people I’m hiring and the books we’re acquiring, I’m already trying to do that,” Canedy told the audience at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, D.C. last October. “I didn’t make the decisions for the wow factor. I’m not the Black publisher, I’m the publisher.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Dana worked in several positions at The New York Times over a 20-year span and eventually served as the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. She has a deep-seated journalistic mindset, so nabbing Pence’s book would not only be a potential goldmine for the publisher but also would let readers know the selection was unprejudiced.

On the other hand, like readers and staffers who protested against Pence’s book deal, the move looked like it went against diversity and inclusion efforts since most voters who identify as BIPOC or LGBTQ+ didn’t vote for Trump or agree with some of the administration’s most controversial actions. But the publisher sees the book as still supporting diversity of thought.

Jonathan Karp, who held the publisher position prior to Dana’s appointment, will reassume the title in the interim. He says in the memo announcing the job change that Dana will still consult on Pence’s memoir and books by Eugene Robinson, a Black columnist for The Washington Post, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a Black historian.

The question remains if Simon & Schuster will hire another person on the diversity spectrum who can boost diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and in the book market. Also, if the next permanent publisher identifies as “diverse,” then they may also have to deal with the decision and the criticism over acquiring a blockbuster book from a prominent White figure.

she lit editor + chief content creator

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Michelle Obama helps us navigate change in new book

Still profiting from the success of Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama announced Thursday that she has a second book coming out in November. The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times will offer reflections about how to change amid changing times. The book will be published by Crown.

HarperCollins union raises $40,000 for strike workers

The strike the publishing industry had its eye on happened Wednesday as HarperCollins Publishers’ union closed its online fundraiser after it received $40,000 from supporters.

The only union at a major U.S. publisher tweeted that the 200+ strikers will receive $200 each as a payment of “hardship money.” The union, which boasts 250+ members, marched the streets of Manhattan demanding a fair contract.

Earlier this month, the union scheduled the strike after it accused HarperCollins of failing to reach a contract promising to pay a predominantly female workforce a livable wage for New York City standards and to put into diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in practice.

Actress Freida Pinto plans to adapt Huma Abedin’s memoir

Both/And by longtime Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin will get the book-to-screen treatment. Frieda Pinto, who is currently starring in the book-to-film Mr. Malcolm’s List based on Suzanne Allain’s 2009 novel, was confirmed by multiple reports to be adapting the memoir for a TV miniseries via her production company Freebird Films. The book was released late last year.

Huma made headlines this week also for being rumored to be dating actor Bradley Cooper. Frieda first gained fame in her breakout performance in 2008’s Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire that was loosely based on a novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup.

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"Shine Bright" by Danyel Smith book cover

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Michelle Zauner Talks ‘Crying in H Mart’ in HBO Docuseries About Asian Food Culture

Lisa Ling and Michelle Zauner discuss shopping and eating in Korean grocery chain H Mart in HBO MAX's "Take Out with Lisa Ling" in the "Korean American Dream" episode. Michelle wrote best-selling, award-winning grief memoir, "Crying in H Mart." Photograph by Hannah Yoon

Memoirist and Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner explains her journey to appreciating Korean cuisine with journalist Lisa Ling.

HBO Max’s “Take Out with Lisa Ling” is a six-episode docuseries featuring East Asian and South Asian communities across the U.S. and how they keep their cultures alive through food. Michelle, the author of the best-selling and award-winning memoir Crying in H Mart, joined Lisa to discuss being grief-stricken at a Korean grocery chain H Mart location and how that grief inspired her to write about losing her mother.

The she lit book review can be found here.

In the sixth episode titled “Korean American Dream,” Michelle and Lisa meet at an H Mart in Northern Virginia.

“I knew pretty early on that the book was going to begin with: ‘Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart,'” Michelle says. “It’s like this private ritual, where I’m just in my thoughts and thinking about my mom.”

Likening her weekly shopping trips to H Mart as her version of “church,” she tells Lisa that she better understood why her mother depended on places like H Mart to connect to her native land.

“My relationship to Korean food changed so much because I was trying to resuscitate her in a way,” Michelle says over jjamppong, her mother’s favorite dish that’s a Korean noodle soup with ingredients like onions, garlic, Korean zucchini, carrots, cabbages, squid, mussels, and pork. The dish, along with many others, gets an honorable mention in the book.

Crying in H Mart centers on Michelle’s relationship with her mother and the fear she feels that her cultural awareness may disappear when her mother dies because she is biracial, her mother Korean and her father White American. How she illustrates her rich culture is mostly through food since authentic Korean ingredients over the years have come stateside through venues such as H Mart.

“Being mixed-race and losing your parent who ties you to this culture, you have to actively work to preserve it,” she says in the docuseries. “In writing this book, I learned so much about our relationship that I didn’t even realize before. That particular type of friction between an immigrant parent and a first-gen American is really a unique, tumultuous relationship.”

The memoir reaches a depth of making sense of a loved one’s premature death. In the docuseries, Lisa asks Michelle how she thinks her mother would’ve reacted to the book after they discuss feeling long-awaited pride in their cultures.

“My mom was really a private person, like a lot of Asian parents are, so I’m sure she would have scolded me for sharing some details,” Michelle says. “But I always think, like, if there was another half-Korean girl who wrote this story about her mother, and I bought this book for my mother and I, I think that my mom would say to me, ‘This girl really loves her mother.'”

Michelle’s book deal with Penguin Random House imprint Knopf came out of a winning 2018 essay of the same title that was published by The New Yorker.

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‘Love Life’ Examines the Underappreciated Black Editor Experience

*Spoilers ahead! Watch the series’ second season on HBO Max*

The Good Place star William Jackson Harper leads the HBO Max series Love Life as a Black editor in a White-dominated publishing world who evolves his approach to diversifying the field.

The first season of the series starred Anna Kendrick as an art dealer stumbling through relationships. In this new iteration, we meet Harper’s character Marcus Watkins, who is also stumbling through relationships with the show emphasizing race and culture in his romantic and career choices via pitch-perfect narration by Keith David.

Marcus Watkins in the beginning of the series is married to Emily, played by Maya Kazan, but he’s starting to feel she doesn’t understand him as a Black man in America since she’s White. He makes this realization after meeting Mia Hines, played by Jessica Williams, at Anna Kendrick’s character Darby’s wedding reception at a bar. Marcus and Mia hit it off, though he’s married and she’s in a relationship with who we soon learn is no other than basketballer Amar’e Stoudemire playing himself. Marcus’ emotional affair is discovered by Emily via iPad messages, and they get a divorce. Marcus blames Mia for the divorce, which of course starts a fight that separates them. They reunite after a few relationships, then another mishap happens in their budding love that forces them to separate.

In the end, they finally get together and stay together with a marriage and baby. As an editor, Marcus struggles to get Black voices heard through the book projects he picks up because his publisher, the fictional Sutton Court Publishing, and boss Josh, played by Steven Boyer, are not supportive of his vision. After Marcus quits his job, Mia convinces him to pursue his own novel. He becomes a full-time author and finishes his novel within two years. And they live happily ever after.

Uplifting Black authors

The first episode “Mia Hines” starts off with Marcus poking fun at his new client, a social media influencer who wants to add an insane amount of words in a subtitle of an instructional book. He wants to take on more serious projects, like an Afrofuturism manuscript he found from a Black grad student at Columbia University.

Josh asks about an update on the social media influencer’s book, and Marcus pipes up about the Afrofuturism book. Josh isn’t interested because the sales projections on that type of book is unpredictable while the social media influencer’s book will become an instant best-seller with her built-in audience.

We see Marcus fighting through the frustration of trying to push more works by authors of color. He decides to invite student-author Trae, played by Jordan Rock, into his office. With Marcus’ notes, Trae is not having it. After ridiculing Marcus’ posters of Black authors from Toni Morrison with cigarette in hand to James Baldwin with cigarette in hand, Trae calls Marcus a “safe, nonthreatening” Black editor voicing the opinions of a White editor. Marcus argues no publisher would take on the thousand-page manuscript. They agree to disagree.

It’s not until the season finale “Epilogue,” Marcus reunites with Trae to get feedback on his novel. Trae, who appears to have sold his book, tells him that Marcus’ Black character trying to maneuver through the White publishing world lacks personality. Marcus takes the note, and it motivates him to improve the book that eventually sells to a publisher. After not seeing eye to eye, they become beta reader brothers.

Celebrating a legend

Marcus visits his University of Michigan professor parents in episode “Destiny Mathis.” His distant father Kirby, played by John Earl Jelks, and mother Donna, played by Fresh Prince of Bel-Air “first Aunt Viv” Janet Hubert, seem to be disappointed that Marcus married Emily too soon out of college and now is divorced. Marcus feels like his happily married parents who are celebrating 35 years together don’t understand the complexities of his modern-day relationships.

In episode “Becca Evans,” Marcus is given an invitation to The Paris Review dinner from Josh as a consolation prize of sorts for receiving a promotion without a raise. The dinner honors poetry legend Nikki Giovanni. It’s the perfect way to lure his father to Manhattan from Ann Arbor for a night of bonding out on the town with their favorite poet.

The fact that the show writers and HBO managed to book the legend and have her on TV is amazing in itself. At 78 years old, Nikki Giovanni takes the stage as the living legend she is, reciting “Autumn Poems.”

the heat
you left with me
last night
still smolders
the wind catches
your scent
and refreshes
my senses

I am a leaf
falling from your tree
upon which I was
impaled

Nikki Giovanni, “Autumn Poems”

Taking a stand

The season finale “Epilogue” makes several time jumps, starting with New Years’ Day 2020 to March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold of society. As Marcus adjusts to working on his laptop from his couch, he realizes his live-in fling is not taking precautions seriously and breaks up with her. But as soon as he grows accustomed to his stay-at-home routine, the murder of George Floyd forces him to examine his role in society as a Black man.

Due to the pandemic, his job furloughs almost the entire staff, leaving Marcus the only employee of color. Via videoconferencing, Josh asks Marcus to review Sutton Court’s message on George Floyd and its commitment to diversity and inclusion. As much as Marcus had to fight to bring on authors of color that he still wasn’t able to bring on, the ask is too much. And Marcus demanded a proper promotion with a salary bump and didn’t get an answer. The missteps spark an expletive-laden explosion of how Sutton Court fails to have any commitment to diversity and inclusion whatsoever. Marcus quits on the spot by slamming his laptop screen down.

He soon reunites with Mia, who texts him out of the blue. They meet up masked up and commit to give their relationship another try. Then there’s marriage, a baby carriage, and the book Marcus always wanted to write.

The series packs in some Black Hollywood heavy-hitters like Blair Underwood and Kimberly Elise, both playing Mia Hines’ parents. Every episode is named after a person, mostly the woman Marcus is seeing, but under the romantic stumbling is a character of color also looking for his footing in the current publishing landscape.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Misfits’ by Michaela Coel

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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

Misfits by Michaela Coel is a smart quick read where the actress, screenwriter, and producer narrates her rise in entertainment by recognizing the people she classifies as misfits while also noticing how moths always seem to make an appearance on her journey.

How many other potential artists with stories we want and need have we lost for the sake of financial profit; have we lost to thoughtless education systems, thoughtless nurturing, thoughtlessness? Why are we platforming misfits, heralding them as newly rich successes while they balance on creaking ladders with little chance of social mobility? I can’t help usher them into this house if there are doors within it they can’t open.

The hourlong book starts with Michaela ready to kill a moth interrupting an informal Stranger Things screening in her flat with her friends. Instinctively, she sprays moth killer. Once her friends gag at the odor, she realizes her sense of smell is gone. That same year in 2018, she’s invited to the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival where she not only vocalizes her story but analyzes the elements that propelled her to unexpected stardom.

The author intersects lepidopterology throughout the key moments that contribute to her career in entertainment from dropping out of college a few times to taking a chance on a virtually White theater school, then writing her own play and performing it, and seeing that play become her first TV show, Chewing Gum.

The term “misfit” can be cross-generational and crosses concepts of gender or culture, simply by a desire for transparency, a desire to see another’s point of view. Misfits who visibly fit in will sometimes find themselves merging with the mainstream, for a feeling of safety.

Race and class define the story. The daughter of an immigrant single mother, Michaela attends a youth theater for free. She’s the only Black girl there. As an adult, the lack of diversity remains the same at her theater school. But when she writes the play that becomes the U.K. Netflix series Chewing Gum, she realizes the pattern continues on the industry level where she had to make sure the majority Black cast received the same treatment as the White actors.

During that show, she admits her business dealings weren’t clear to her. She eventually declines that newsworthy million-dollar offer from Netflix for her next show that evolves into HBO’s I May Destroy You. While working long hours on her second show, a night out for a break becomes the impetus for the future award-winning series as she is accosted by a flashback that makes her realize she had been raped. It’s then she finds herself leaning on the misfits she met inside and outside the industry to help her in the healing process and the storytelling process.

Overall, the personal manifesto highlights the author’s most meaningful memories describing where she is now and uses interesting symbolism from misfits to moths. Because of the length and substance, it’s a good choice for readers trying to stick to their annual reading goals or looking for something short and sweet.

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‘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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‘The Vanishing Half’ Highlights Racial Passing Along with Previous Well-Known Novels

Perched on The New York Times Best Sellers list for the past four weeks with an HBO miniseries in the works, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is the anti-racism novel we need right now as the country grips with another tide of facing race relations.

The Vanishing Half, a novel in the 350-page range in the hardcover format, follows light-skinned Black twin sisters as they run away from their unique Louisiana town with only people of their complexions to New Orleans in the 1950s. As they adjust to their new lives, one twin disappears without a trace to pass as White to marry her White boss while the other one returns home after her abusive marriage to a dark-skinned Black man.

The colorism conversation when it comes to “passing”—when someone decides to disguise themselves in another race or ethnicity for a better quality of life—has been seen in previous books from decades prior when the act was practiced more often.

Passing was more common in the early 20th century amid the Great Migration and European immigration defining the big cities. Mostly when passing is mentioned, it’s in reference to Blacks with complexions light enough to pass as White, but European immigrants also practiced this with some considered to have darker skin like Italians passing for Jews, Jews passing for Gentiles, Poles passing for Germans, and Whites passing for Blacks, according to Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature by Werner Sollors.

At the end of The Vanishing Half, Brit says she was inspired by Imitation of Life, more the 1959 film rather than the 1933 novel it was based on by White Jewish author Fannie Hurst, who came under fire at the time for stereotypical presentations of the Black mother character as a Mammy figure and her light-skinned daughter as a tragic mulatta passing as White. Culturally, it’s become a cinematic classic with Black mothers using the film as a cautionary tale for their Black daughters to not neglect their matriarchs under any circumstances, especially for White privilege.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Fannie also was a secretary for now-celebrated author Zora Neale Hurston while famed poet Langston Hughes created a satire play of Imitation of Life that reversed the roles with a Black family and a White maid. For insight on the tumultuous friendship of Zora and Langston mainly due to their relationships with others in the movement and their disagreements about their plays, check out Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor.

The practice of passing has left holes in Black families since the end of slavery, and it’s a topic that’s still relevant today as people may or may not defend their ethnicities based on their looks. Nella Larsen, a biracial author from the Harlem Renaissance wrote a 1929 novel called Passing, a tale about two Black childhood friends in 1920s New York who are both light-skinned enough to pass as White. One woman does pass while the other stays in the Black community, similar to The Vanishing Half. Starring actresses Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, Passing will be a film set for release this year, according to IMDb.

Nella, a daughter of a Danish woman and a Danish West Indian man, was considered a rising star in the Harlem Renaissance with Passing and her only other novel Quicksand. After becoming the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship that she used for an artistic journey through Europe, she returned to New York and her nursing career, shedding her novelist life. With growing up in an all-White family after her father died and her mother remarried, her novels are considered semi-autobiographical.

The Passing film’s directors, Deborah Riley Draper and Jennifer Galvin, are also developing a TV series on the book described as “Downton Abbey meets Get Out.” And with The Vanishing Half also being turned into a miniseries for TV, stories on the history of racial passing, particularly for Black women, may gain more attention.