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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 Review: ‘Red Clocks’ by Leni Zumas

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is a layered, multi-perspective story following the lives of four women in the Pacific Northwest who find themselves questioning the feelings they have about motherhood as the U.S. starts implementing restrictive reproductive laws. 

The characters are labeled as their occupations. First, we have Ro, known as the biographer. She is in the process of writing a biography of a lesser-known 19th century female polar explorer named Eivør Mínervudottír. Still in mourning over her brother’s death, Ro gets up every day and teaches history at the local high school. Sometimes, she starts her mornings off at a fertility specialist’s office since she is trying to get pregnant in her late thirties with the assistance of a sperm donor. 

“When Congress proposed the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and it was sent to the states for a vote, the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House and Senate in league with a fetus-loving new president. Thirty-nine states voted to ratify. A three-quarters majority… She couldn’t believe the Personhood Amendment had become real with all these citizens against it.” 

The Personhood Amendment was just ratified by Congress giving every fertilized egg the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property. This federal law also bans abortion in all 50 states with providers at risk of being charged with second-degree murder and abortion seekers at risk of being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization is also banned as the transfer of an embryo from laboratory to uterus is considered illegal. 

Another law, Every Child Needs Two, is taking effect soon where two parents with a valid marriage license are the only eligible people to adopt children. Single, unmarried people like Ro will soon be prohibited from adopting children. Her plan for motherhood has always been delayed as she was searching for her soulmate, but these laws have quickened her actions. She’s getting tests frequently to see if her body can carry a baby to term with a sperm donor. But her chances of getting pregnant are low. And now she wonders how much time she has to rush her adoption application to get a child before she’s not allowed to. 

“You can’t say it was rape or incest—nobody cares how it got into you.”

Mattie, known as the daughter, is a student in Ro’s class. A stellar student, she finds out she’s pregnant. Her best friend, Yasmine, had been in the same situation right when the Personhood Amendment went into effect. The situation Yasmine was in destroys their friendship, so Mattie feels lonely as she looks for ways to get an abortion secretly, whether that means crossing the border into Canada or getting help from the mender. 

“American intelligence agencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.” 

The mender, or Gin, is a traditional herbalist who lives away from society in the forest where her family has been known to make concoctions that treat ailments for centuries. When the Personhood Amendment goes into effect, Gin is still helping women with their abortions like she had always done, like her family generations before her had always done as reproductive care. When Mattie walks through her door, she feels a tinge for the sense of motherhood she gave up. Soon after, she is in a courtroom on trial for administering an abortion to another woman who ends up in the hospital with serious injuries. 

Then there’s Susan, the wife. She is the wife to Didier, another high school teacher who happens to be work friends with Ro. Battling the fatigue of raising two younger children, Susan is tired and feels unappreciated by Didier, who likes to come home after dinner with his work buddies without giving her a heads up. Their marriage is fraught with friction that only Susan senses as she goes through her daily housewife chores. She wonders what it would be like to abandon her marriage and her children for another man, even with the Every Child Needs Two law looming. 

In the background of all these contemporary perspectives is the long-gone explorer Eivør Mínervudottír, who according to biographer Ro, goes on all-male expeditions after rejecting marriage at age 19. Male domination follows Eivør as she constantly educates the men she’s venturing into the Arctic with. Though we don’t sense any longing for children or becoming a mother from her, Eivør’s femaleness still leads to her demise in a world where her rights were always restricted. 

“The girl is a mirror, repeating, folding time in half. When the mender had the same problem, she didn’t solve it how Temple told her to. Terminations were lawful then, but the mender wanted to know how it felt to grow a human, with her own blood and minerals, in her own red clock.” 

From the quote above, we learn “red clocks” is a term for the uterus, the organ that carries babies up to nine months in pregnancy and sheds its lining every month for a period. The organ is the biological clock for women, always running on a schedule for the purpose of reproduction. 

Mattie wants to stop the clock in order to continue her studies and to go off to college. Even though she was careful, even though her friend Yasmine was careful, pregnancy still occurred, and pregnancy in their teenage minds is shameful and destructive. On the other hand, Ro wants to get the clock fixed. She desperately wants a child, and when she learns that her star student Mattie is pregnant and needs assistance in getting an abortion, she can’t help but feel the complicated feelings. She can’t get pregnant while the teenagers who are in her face every day can easily get pregnant and not want to be pregnant, not want to have a child.

Complicated feelings come up for Gin when Mattie approaches her makeshift clinic for assistance. When abortion was legal, Gin used her red clock to give birth, but she didn’t keep the baby. Though she helps other females with their abortions, something about Mattie’s case strikes a chord with Gin. On another end of the spectrum, Susan gave birth to her first child when she was finishing up law school. The regret of not fulfilling her career goals because she had to start a family knots up inside her. Her red clock worked when she wasn’t ready, but now she’s wondering what life would’ve been like if it had not worked efficiently and she wasn’t tethered down to a husband and children. 

How the characters’ lives intersect is awe-inspiring because their stories reflect the complexity of reproductive decisions. It’s not easy to have a baby, and sometimes the woman with the red clock is the only one factored into the equation. Feelings change about motherhood where we see Ro putting the pedal to the metal to beat laws that would restrict her decision on motherhood to Susan who already has kids but now feels anchored to a marriage she no longer wants.

One underlying factor throughout the narratives is the characters are all dealing with the loss of a person or the sense of family that is surfacing more as they make their decisions on bringing a baby into the mix. The mourning seems to be louder at this stage in their lives and shows how even when family is perceived as important, depending on where you stand with your family, there is still insurmountable stress as the person wanting to expand the family.

Overall, this novel is very timely as the U.S. deals with anti-abortion laws and the overturning of the history-making Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that almost hit its 50-year milestone. Regardless of the pro-choice, anti-abortion, or in-between supporters, the story parallels real life well with the attention on reproductive laws and how those changes can affect all women, like the characters in this small fishing town in Oregon where its proximity to Canada means nothing. The rhythmic flow of the story helps open up the characters’ narratives, though minor characters’ narratives sometimes get lost in the interweaving. At the center, still, is how political and personal decisions on reproduction can wreak havoc in changing times. 

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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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Karyn Parsons’ Sweet Blackberry Promotes Lesser-Known Stories for Black History Month

SHE LIT BLOG - Saving the Day: Garrett Morgan's Life-Changing Invention of the Traffic Signal by Karyn Parsons

Actress and author Karyn Parsons is sharing the stories this February her literary nonprofit Sweet Blackberry produces to educate kids on Black history.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star discussed how her books and animated films are narrating the stories of Henry Box Brown and Garrett Morgan this week on the third hour of ABC’s Good Morning America.

Henry Box Brown was an enslaved man in 1848 when he mailed himself to freedom from slaveholding Virginia to the free city of Philadelphia in a box.

“I was so fascinated by this story, and also by the fact that I’ve never heard of it and my friends hadn’t heard it,” Karyn tells Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes on GMA3: What You Need To Know. “I really wanted to bring this story and others that I started to discover, which my mom brought to me as well, to kids. And I wanted it to do it in the form of books and animated films. So, that’s how Sweet Blackberry started.”

The Journey of Henry Box Brown is narrated in verse by Emmy Award winner and Academy Award nominee Alfre Woodard. The story was Sweet Blackberry’s first animated film in 2005.

The daughter of a librarian, Karyn also shared the story of Garrett Morgan, the inventor of what would become the traffic light. Though Morgan is one of the icons named during Black History Month, his full story of being a businessman and inventor during the early 20th century is rarely recognized, Karyn says.

“The traffic signal that we know today: the light…, not the color, but the actual mechanism, that’s all Garrett Morgan,” she says. “We live with that today, and we take it for granted and never think it was a Black man who did it.”

Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, Saving the Day: Garrett Morgan’s Life-Changing Invention of the Traffic Signal came out in December as a hardcover picture book for kids between the ages of four and eight. The book, also told in verse, is written by Karyn and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.

The story is the basis of the second film from Sweet Blackberry called Garrett’s Gift, narrated by actress and recording artist Queen Latifah. 

Karyn’s late Fresh Prince costar James Avery, who played her character Hilary Bank’s father Philip Banks, loved sharing lesser-known Black history stories, Karyn says, calling him a “historian” in his own right.

“It didn’t really occur to me though until just recently how much he had an impact on me, on my bringing these stories to kids,” she says in the ABC interview. “A lot of that came from James.”

Founded in 2005, Sweet Blackberry creates visual content and publishes books with a mission to “bring little known stories of African American achievement to children everywhere.” The organization provides virtual school sessions with DVD viewings, interactive discussions with Karyn, hands-on projects, and guides for teachers to support the telling of the stories.

The organization, along with Little, Brown, published Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight about the famous Black female aviator in December 2020.

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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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Alice Sebold’s Fixation on Accused Rapist’s Race in ‘Lucky’ Forecasts Overturned Conviction

*Update post available on Alice Sebold’s apology and publisher Simon & Schuster’s response*

The man accused of rape by best-selling author Alice Sebold had his conviction overturned by the New York Supreme Court this week due to missteps in the case decades earlier. The author tells the story of her 1981 rape as a Syracuse University student in the 1999 memoir Lucky that unnecessarily fixates on the race of her perpetrator.

As a young White woman raped by an individual she identifies as a Black man, Alice pinpoints other experiences with Black men that come off as cringeworthy today in light of the recent news.

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in prison for the rape and was released in 1999, the same year Lucky was released to critical acclaim. The memoir eventually led to the success of Alice’s most famous novel, The Lovely Bones published in 2002 by Little, Brown and Company, loosely based on her own experience about a teenage girl who is raped and killed by a predator in her neighborhood. The Lovely Bones was turned into a film in 2009 starring Saiorse Ronan and Susan Sarandon.

Lucky, available from Simon & Schuster’s Scribner imprint, was in the midst of becoming a film on Netflix. Screenwriter Timothy Mucciante was working on the project, according to multiple reports, when he realized the script wasn’t matching the book, especially during the court proceedings retold by Alice in the book. Timothy hired his own private investigator to look into the case. In an exclusive, Variety reports Lucky the film, which would’ve starred You actress Victoria Pedretti, was dropped after losing financing months ago.

Alice hasn’t commented publicly about the overturned conviction.

Constant emphasis on Black men

I knew the old men hadn’t raped me. I knew the tall black man in a green suit, sitting on a bus-station bench, hadn’t raped me. I was still afraid.

Lucky, Chapter Four

The book starts with detail of the rape: how she’s accosted and attacked by a stranger in a tunnel near campus, how she walks back to her dorm bloody and shaken, how she undergoes the post-assault medical examination. When she returns to her dorm, a friend’s boyfriend offers a hug. But she’s apprehensive. That’s when the boyfriend, who is Black, asks Alice if her assailant was Black. Alice confirms the assumption.

This exchange is problematic, reinforcing the stereotypes of criminals usually being Black. It says it’s OK if someone Black makes that assumption. Even if the event took place, it shows the lack of racial diversity in publishing overall with that passage allowed to run in the millions of book copies sold.

The above pullquote references later on when Alice is driving with her mother to the University of Pennsylvania to see her father and sister. Outside the window, she sees Black men living their lives, and it scares her. She even tells her mother that she feels like she had been “lain underneath” all these Black men. Her mother says that’s “ridiculous.”

What led to the overturned conviction is in the memoir. Alice has a run-in with a Black man, who claims she looks familiar. It spooks her because she believes he’s her rapist. She notifies authorities about the run-in. After a police lineup, officers tell her she picked the wrong man. Later, a hair analysis is traced back to Anthony Broadwater, who has the pseudonym of Gregory Madison in Lucky. That analysis has since been discredited by the Department of Justice and the FBI as a lone method to identify suspects.

Anthony Broadwater did not know that Alice was profiting from the incident that put him behind bars, according to the Daily Mail.

Race, class lead to perfect conviction

My rapist was poor, black, and uneducated, and came from a family with an entrenched criminal record. I was a middle-class white girl attending an expensive university and I was raped not on property owned by the college, but in a public park on the edge of it… And, like the victim in the Stanford case, I knew that my words mattered.

Lucky, “Afterword”

In a 2017 afterword, Alice brings up Chanel Miller’s story of being the unidentified victim in the Stanford rape case that is chronicled in the best-selling memoir Know My Name. Using race and class, Alice compares her case where her accused rapist was imprisoned for 16 years to Chanel’s case where the Stanford swimmer who raped her only served three months in jail.

Race comes up in Chanel’s story but her own race as a young woman who is half-Chinese and how that surprised some supporters when she revealed her identity. Class also becomes an issue because she accused a White male, Olympic-level swimmer of raping her while she was unconscious. A book review can be found on shelit.com.

The Lucky afterword acknowledges in the above quote that the racial and socioeconomic dynamics created a perfect storm for a conviction that we now know is another exoneration of an innocent Black man in America.

Alice’s story could be compared to Tricia Meili’s story as told in her memoir, I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility, published by Scribner in 2004. Tricia’s horrific rape dominated the news in 1989 and led to the arrest of five boys who happened to be in Central Park at the time she was jogging. Tricia, who is White, worked as an investment banker while the boys, known as the Central Park Five, were Black and Latino from low-income families. Now, those men who served time and have had their convictions overturned in 2002 are considered the Exonerated Five, after they told their story through Ava DuVernay‘s lens in When They See Us.

A Black prisoner serving time for sexual assault is 3½ times more likely to be innocent than a White sexual assault convict, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, because of the high likelihood of cross-racial misidentification by White victims involved in violent crimes with Black assailants.

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what's lit

Noname Celebrates Opening of the Radical Hood Library

Book Club Headquarters - Radical Hood Library / Instagram

Indie rapper and book club innovator Noname announced the opening of Book Club Headquarters: Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles Saturday.

In a flyer, the library asked for donations of new and used books preferably written by Black and Brown authors, especially novels and children’s books. The library is a “black led organization that was created to service black/brown folks,” according to its book.clubhq Instagram account. Online, books can be checked out through the library’s Libib account.

The opening was an RSVP’d event. The library’s address has yet to be revealed publicly.

The daughter of a Black-owned bookstore owner, Noname started the Noname Book Club in 2019 to highlight “reading material for the homies” by exposing Black and Brown readers to books of today and yesterday that explore intersectionality. The book club now has 12 metro chapters across the U.S. and a prison program that delivers book club selections to incarcerated peoples.

Every month, Noname picks a book and a book club member aka “homie” picks one. Socially distanced in-person and virtual meetings are ongoing this month for September’s books: Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’shaun L. Harrison, Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon, and The Skin I’m in by Sharon G. Flake.

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book reviews

How Dawnn Karen’s ‘Dress Your Best Life’ Guides You Through Your Post-Pandemic Wardrobe

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

Fashion psychologist Dawnn Karen wants people to feel confident in their clothes.

Her self-help book, Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level published by Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown Spark imprint, came out the same time the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of society and forced us to stay home. That means we exchanged our business attire for loose-fitting athleisure to feel comfortable in our living space-turned-workspace. But now that many of us are returning to the office amid delta variant fears or expecting to return eventually, her fashion psychology curriculum can be applied to the current era.

Sweatsuit to Pantsuit

During the pandemic, many of us may have been suffering from repetitious wardrobe complex, which is what the author defines as wearing the same clothes—or versions of the same clothes—over and over again. That means our tie-dye sweatsuits and other forms of athleisure that we zhooshed up as much as we could for the Zoom calls have kept us in a loop.

Staying at home subtracted the decision fatigue many of us dealt with when it came to selecting five office-friendly outfits for five workdays. Dawnn Karen tells readers to avoid this fatigue when you’re faced with too many options for what to wear and buy, which in turn makes you feel often overwhelmed and paralyzed in making decisions you later regret. Buyer’s remorse, anyone? To get ready for the physical office, she suggests taking the time to sense any discomfort with an outfit that you probably hadn’t put on since March 2020.

Mood is central to our outfit selection, according to Dawnn Karen’s fashion psychology. Before approaching your closet in the morning or the night before, she advises to practice mood illustration dressing, or meditating briefly by matching your outfit with how you are feeling. Feeling upbeat? Wear that pop of color.

Feeling down? Wear that comfortable skirt. Or take another step to practice mood enhancement dressing, or to choose what you wear to modify your mood for the better. It’s a tactic to wear the most office-appropriate attire that will make you feel the most confident, e.g. the not-so-sky-high heels or the cardigan for the air conditioning, especially if returning to the office after a year and a half and feeling the weight of pressure to return to work.

“When you thoughtfully assess your emotional state and then dress to respect or match it,” she writes. “The goal here is not to transform or challenge yourself with clothes but to embrace, accept, and honor yourself exactly where you are.”

Stressing Over Dressing

For women, fashion situational code switching may have plagued our former workdays, particularly when you had to put on the pantsuit, preferably designer or name brand, to compete in the office when you would rather wear jeans and a nice top. Switching your attire up for the social setting can be stressful and can extend to the hair and makeup routine where you feel you have to wear your hair a certain way or tone down your makeup.

Fashion identification assimilation and fashion incongruence could be two issues reflective of the times. The former is when you use style to fit in with or blend into a cultural or social group, the author writes, when the latter is when your ideal dress and perceived dress are incompatible. You may want to wear the comfortable clothes that you’ve been wearing for months at home, but it might break the workplace dress code. Then you might think those black leggings you wore at home can be mistaken for black slacks in the office, but that is most likely a no-go. More employees are expecting rules on lax office wear post-pandemic, business insiders forecast, while some employees may return to an unchanged model.

A focal accessory can bring comfort, the author describes as an item that holds psychological value and may be worn repeatedly. It can be worn with your work and outside-of-work outfits. She advises to start small such as with a family heirloom necklace pendant, which can bring the warmth of protection in spirit.

Comfortable in Your Skin Again

“In my experience, the best way to get off the retail therapy treadmill and break the cycle of buying, regretting, then buying some more is mindfulness,” Dawnn Karen writes in the chapter she named “The Science Behind Shopping.”

Need new threads? This book can help you figure out your wardrobe upon emerging from our forced stay-at-home lives. More Americans are purging their closets for multiple reasons from expired trends to weight gain, according to the Associated Press, as we slowly return to normal.

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what's lit

Author Natasha Diaz Wants Us to Know Black Jewish Stories Matter

When Natasha Díaz discovered her debut novel was excluded from a Black Jewish book list, she went to Twitter to air her frustrations that led to a conversation on multiracial Jewish literature.

Natasha’s young adult novel Color Me In features a sixteen-year-old protagonist who moves in with Black mother’s family after her parents divorce, but her White Jewish father wants to throw her a belated bat mitzvah. The change in surroundings and circumstances heightens the racial and religious intolerance, according to the publisher Penguin Random House imprint Ember, but the teenager who’s usually quiet tries to find her voice amid the noise. On her author website, she says the book is “inspired by my experiences as a white passing, multiracial woman.”

In June, Natasha tweeted she had submitted the book that was first published in 2019 to the Association of Jewish Libraries for inclusion in its list of Black Jewish literature in light of the George Floyd protests. She said the association refused to add her book to the list.

The Association of Jewish Libraries created a list that includes the YA best-seller Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert, which comes from Little, Brown & Co. Books for Young Readers about a Black girl who’s trying to deal with her White Jewish stepbrother’s mental illness. The list is the seventh installment in the association’s Love Your Neighbor series, an initiative to promote works by Jewish authors in the aftermath of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

By mid-June, Natasha started a campaign asking for followers to amplify Black Jewish writers whether they were published or unpublished. Within two months, she penned the article “What It’s Like to Be a Black Jewish Writer” in Alma, a digital media outlet focused on pop culture content about Jewish women.

I never read a character who was grappling with where to fit, how to own her whole self, and also how to take accountability for white presenting privilege, in a book. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s my life, and while I was so incredibly proud to learn my book was “a first,” I couldn’t help but also feel infinitely sad that my Black Jewish experience, which is so impacted by my proximity to whiteness, is the only one to travel through the traditional publishing channels and represent young Black Jews in children’s literature.

In the article, she has a roundtable discussion that includes Marra Gad, the author of the award-winning memoir The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl from Agate Publishing, and Rachel Harrison-Gordon, the filmmaker behind Broken Bird about a Black Jewish girl preparing for her bat mitzvah. Also in August, Natasha was interviewed by the Jewish Book Council and discussed her book’s impact.

Perhaps one of the most visible Black Jewish authors is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of writing legend Alice Walker, who wrote about her multiethnic upbringing in her first memoir, Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, published by Penguin Random House in 2002. Rebecca is the author and editor of seven books, including a debut novel called Adé: A Love Story, originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. and Amazon Publishing Co. in 2013. A year later, pop icon Madonna was set to direct a film based on the book.

Meanwhile, Natasha continues to discover and elevate multiracial and Black Jewish writers on social media who still battle deep-rooted hatred from within the White Jewish community and antisemitism outside the community.

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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

Publisher Flubs Quarantine House Tweet by Forgetting Authors of Color

Photo by Prateek Katyal from Pexels

Little, Brown and Company shared a quarantine house tweet Monday morning to its almost half a million followers, but it was quickly met with criticism after sharing six houses with all white authors. After most of the responders asked the publisher to delete the offensive tweet, the publisher later did just that and apologized for its oversight. But this incident added fire to the continuous discussion on diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry.

The quarantine house tweet trend has taken over the social media network with users grouping well-known people in a particular industry in so-called houses and asking their followers to pick a number, a house they would want to be quarantined in. The trend is supposed to be a viral uplifter amid the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic where most people are staying home in quarantine. But the fun feel of this tweet backfired.

A few authors and other tweeters quickly noticed that none of the houses featured authors of color. The publisher responded that it purposely highlighted its roster of authors, which isn’t diverse.

Some responders mentioned that the Hachette Book Group imprint is associated with authors of color such as: Attica Locke, who is currently a writer on the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere promoting her recent book Heaven, My Home; Walter Mosley, who won the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award Monday; Malcolm Gladwell, the well-known intellectual with a recent book called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know; and Marie Kondo, whose new book Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life came out last week. Walter and Marie later were promoted on the publisher’s timeline along with press articles about their work.

Dawnn Karen, the author of Dress Your Best Life: How to Use Fashion Psychology to Take Your Look—and Your Life—to the Next Level, and Leslie Gray Streeter, the author of Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like “Journey” in the Title, are two black women authors with upcoming books within the imprint. A promotional tweet for Leslie’s book was shared by Little, Brown and Co. and another one was retweeted, so the social media promotion for authors of color ramped up after the quarantine house tweet was taken down.

Little, Brown and Co.’s admission that its author roster was not diverse should force the publisher to take diversity more seriously like Flatiron Books promised to do after the backlash around Jeanine Cummins’ best-selling novel American Dirt. The diversity issue in publishing also coincides with #DVpit Twitter pitch party for marginalized authors looking for literary agent representation next week on April 22 and April 23.