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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Speak’ by Tunde Oyeneyin

Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Tunde Oyeneyin is a memoir about discovering body positivity and navigating a purposeful journey that’s vividly told by the popular Peloton instructor.

Growing up in Katy, Texas, Tunde is the only daughter out of three children of her Nigerian parents. At a young age, she’s considered overweight, and the shady comments she would hear about her prettiness being dimmed by her size marks her upbringing. A hard worker, she takes on multiple jobs in college, including one behind a department store makeup counter. This leads her to gaining clients who take note of her makeup application skills. She eventually moves to Los Angeles for a chance to groom her budding career until tragedy strikes.

She loses her younger brother, and a few years later, her mother, then her father. The back-to-back deaths of her immediate family send her into a depression. But opportunities keep coming her away that pull her out of the abyss and bring new urgency to live her life with purpose.

As she focuses on her mental and physical health, she develops a passion for cycling after taking a class. The inspirational shouting to keep moving forward sends her on a new career path. After trying out for Peloton more than once, she finally nabs a spot and quickly rises to the top of being one of most popular cycling instructors on the fitness platform. She takes the moment to inspire others, such as the time she decided to shave her head and the time she made an impromptu speech on why Black Lives Matter amid the 2020 racial justice movement.

The book’s title comes from her acronym S.P.E.A.K., which stands for Surrender, Power, Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge. The subtitle is Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. The lessons Tunde learns from her life, especially around being comfortable within her own body, weave together nicely as she narrates her story via audiobook. Her voice is melodious in expressing the emotion she felt at different moments.

There is an examination of her luck. She has been given a lot of opportunities, but some are inextricably tied to the tragedies she has endured. She wins a prize, for example, but the prize contributes to her brother’s death. The blame sits heavy on her soul, but she realizes that her only option is to live her life to the fullest.

Overall, her memoir doesn’t necessarily give action steps on how to take control of your life as the title may entail, but it’s more of how she took those action steps that undoubtedly resonates with a wide audience beyond the Peloton cycle seat.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

Maya (Golden Brooks)

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

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

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

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

“You.”

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

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

Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross)

Lynn (Persia White)

Toni (Jill Marie Jones)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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experiences

Marie Forleo Talks About How ‘Everything is Figureoutable’

she lit From left, Grasie Mercedes speaks to Marie Forleo about her "Everything is Figureoutable" book at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Motivational guru Marie Forleo landed in Los Angeles as a part of her Everything is Figureoutable last Friday at the Skirball Cultural Center. Though the event was not an over-the-top “Beyoncé meets TED talk” compared to her home New York event, around 400 attendees came to listen to her reasoning behind her new self-help book.

In conversation with actress Grasie Mercedes currently writing for NBC’s Perfect Harmony, Marie glowing in a neon green top said her first book has been a work-in-progress since 2011. The event started with brave audience members jumping onto the stage to dance to the hottest pop songs from Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl and Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby.

After showing the audience a photo of her and Grasie in a Bring It On-era Crunch Fitness class from 20 years ago, Marie dropped wisdom about her philsophy behind the title of her book, which she said was inspired by her mother.

“This converation is really a follow-up if even we were to believe and accept this notion that everything is truly figureoutable—which again I believe in my bones to be the truth—then we need to ask ourselves what stops us, what gets in our way, what prevents us from figuring this out,” she said. “And while we can all come up with a laundry list of things that stops us, and one of the biggest things are our excuses. Those nasty little lies we all tell ourselves from time to time.”

Along with real-life stories on overcoming obstacles, the book has guidance on how to think positively in order to find solutions to everyday problems.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean we can change every circumstance to be the exact way that we want it to be—that’s not always possible,” she said. “But ‘Everything is Figureoutable’ awakens your creative wisdom, your own intiutive intelligence, so that you can rise up and meet the circumstances and challenges of your life and come out stronger, better, and bigger than you were before.”

She wants the book to make readers realize they have more control over their lives through thinking outside the box, and how not doing this exacerbates mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. Warning the book should not be used as treatment, she said it could help those dealing with mental health issues find creative and positive solutions to their predicaments.

With the event running about two hours, Marie ended the night with crowd selfies and photos with her book-purchasing fans. Book Soup was the sponsoring seller.

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what's lit

‘Queen Sugar’ Actress Tina Lifford Reveals New Lifestyle Book

Off the heels of Queen Sugar‘s fifth season renewal, one of its stars has announced her book tour.

Tina Lifford, who plays Violet aka Aunt Vi in the Oprah Winfrey Network drama, is on a mission to push mental and spiritual fitness through her new book, The Little Book of Big Lies. She recently discussed the book on an episode of Sister Circle on TV One and emphasized its title comes from overcoming life’s obstacles.

“There’s a self inside of you,” she told talk show co-hosts, Quad Webb, Syleena Johnson, Rashan Ali and Trina Braxton. “You need to prioritize it, take care of it, and more importantly any event that has taken place in your life that has left you feeling less than, not good enough, incapable, or limited is a lie. You gotta figure out how to let go of that lie and take your power back from it.”

Tina, also recognizable from roles on South Central and Parenthood, says she’s an “inner fitness strategist,” as she labels the book as a master class set in 14 personal stories.

“People make the mistake thinking that with success comes automatic happiness,” she said. “Two different things. Two different skill sets, and you’ve gotta learn both of those skill sets. If you’re not paying attention for the skill set for happiness, you’re gonna wake up with lots of money and power and you’re gonna wonder, ‘Why do I feel so bad?'”

Tina held an event in Atlanta last Saturday for her “Inner Fitness, Outer Beauty” tour with celebrity stylist J. Bolin.

“You gotta learn how to dress your spirit. You gotta know who you are on the inside,” she said. “You gotta not only know who you are on the inside, know who you want to become. And learn to say, ‘Up until now life has been this way, but this point forward it can be this way.'”

Her book is on pre-order and comes out in November.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say)More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are by Elaine Welteroth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is a divine order, a divine flow to our lives. We don’t need to have all the answers. But our job is to keep on dreaming and trusting enough to put on foot in front of the other.

“More Than Enough” by Elaine Welteroth is a perfect snapshot of a biracial woman who reached such a historic career pinnacle at a young age and is willing to share her climb on the ladder, knowing based on race and upbringing that her climb is unique.

I found myself finding a lot in common with Elaine. I’m a Black woman editor with NorCal roots who had similar dreams but mine took me elsewhere and, like her, there were signs already putting me on a path that I didn’t see then. She starts her story from her childhood, pulling out certain memories that she now knows signaled her destiny. For example, she would make her own magazines for her fake beauty salon in her backyard with her friend. Like a lemonade stand, it made her realize her entrepreneurial and creative spirit.

By the time she gets to college, she’s in a toxic relationship with the boy she followed to Sac State (being from Sacramento luckily a rep from that college told me my grades were too good and I should go to my dream school). She mentioned it on her book tour and in her book that she regretted not applying for her dream school, Stanford, because she was following a boy, a common mistake. But in college, she meets a lifelong mentor, a professor whom she connects with over their similar parentage (Black mother, White father). On a trip, she shares with the professor and another student that she wants to be a magazine editor-in-chief at Essence. They praise her confidence to follow that dream.

When she does earn the Essence internship, the Ebony editor-in-chief she idolizes finally contacts her after she bombarded the editor with messages and asks her to work with her on a photo shoot in Malibu. There, Elaine suggests the model, tennis star Serena Williams, wear a blue bathing suit. She notices her faux pas, but it turns into an assistantship in which she lets go of her dream internship to pursue the opportunity. After being on the fast track, she’s let go at Ebony and worries about being pigeonholed in Black media. But because of her networking, she finds her way into Conde Nast, first at Glamour then at Teen Vogue, with eventually taking the top editor role at the now esteemed teen publication. Once there, she realizes being the first Black woman in charge holds a lot of responsibility, and that means navigating the direction of content to include all teen girls.

What I enjoyed the most about this book is the candidness. She admits to her stumbles, goes into details over those stumbles, and lets the reader know she thought it was the end until her life took another turn. Before every chapter, one of her quotes is highlighted, and it shows how carefully she chose her words to inspire others with her story. The book is on the long side with over 300 pages (like Michelle Obama’s Becoming), but it reads smoothly as you see her growth. Since I am in the same field and from the same area, I felt a strong connection with her and felt inspired by her moves, but it’s a memoir with a positive message that can transcend to women of all ages, but particularly those who are in college and their early 20s when they’re still trying to find their way when it comes to their careers.

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Book Review: ‘Grit’ by Angela Duckworth

Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success by Angela Duckworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Grit” by Angela Duckworth is a great analysis on why we do what we do and what drives us to do that. Through her studies of different groups to just noticing her family and friends, she opens up your mind to how our passions define our purpose.

One point in the book that stands out is how we use certain tools like a career path to really explore our passion and how those tools itself may be misconstrued as the passion. She used the example of a journalist I admire, Jeffrey Gettleman, who was the longtime East Africa bureau chief and correspondent for The New York Times. In college, he fell in love with East Africa. It wasn’t until a professor told Jeffrey his writing talent could translate into a journalism career. That career path never crossed Jeffrey’s mind until he realized he could tell stories throughout East Africa. So Jeffrey’s passion is East Africa, not journalism, but journalism is the vessel able to carry his passion.

As a journalist myself, I realized not everyone is passionate about the field itself but more with what they’re covering. I’m a woman of color in the very white male-dominated environment of business journalism. Though I try to convince other journalists of color to join less diverse newsrooms like mine, they’re not interested. But they might just be interested in covering their own culture and using journalism as a vessel. I, on the other hand, use journalism for my love for writing, so I can write about any news stories (as long as I’m getting paid) and be fine with the content I’m producing. It’s evident in my career where I’ve reported on various topics, which tends to be unusual for a journalist of color because many decide to restrict their topics to what they’re passionate about. This book helped me piece this understanding together.

Overall, it’s a detailed analysis of passion and purpose, but with the scientific and experimental factors, you can also see how it plays out in your life. Are you following your passion? Have you abandoned projects though you thought it was for your passion? The author emphasizes how it’s OK to quit a project when the “natural stop” arrives. I ran a list of things in my mind that I thought I was passionate about, but apparently I wasn’t. It’s about finding that vessel to pursue passion. Sometimes, we’re using the wrong vessels due to our environment, e.g. a parent wanting us to play piano but we don’t practice then piano lessons are wasted. The book is an analysis that could help with your analysis on figuring out your passion and purpose and if it shows in your grit.

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Book Review: ‘The Art of Gathering’ by Priya Parker

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It MattersThe Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

They want to be there. They feel lucky to be there. They might well be considering giving the gathering their all. Your next task is to fuse people, to turn a motley collection of attendees into a tribe. A talented gatherer doesn’t hope for disparate people to become a group. She makes them a group.

“The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker goes into detail about the elements of not just coordinating an event but making sure it’s a purposeful event for attendees. It sounds basic, but with examples from the author’s real-life experiences and public experiences, you realize these elements are not taken into consideration most of the time at the events you attend or plan.

I read this book because I’m active in so many organizations and sometimes want to offer my amateur services of coordinating an event. But I’ve clashed with a women’s group I’m involved in because they didn’t want the sense of sisterhood. With seeing other women’s groups succeed in attendance with members expressing their affection for the events and the groups, I felt sisterhood is a must with a hobby organization that usually meets on the weekend. It’s the solution to luring attendees to an event who would have to navigate Los Angeles traffic to get to an event they had to be at. And I realized you don’t really need guests that would be seen as celebrities; the group can fuse into a tribe and create a purposeful atmosphere.

When reading this book, I thought to myself I’m on the right track, but many others are not. The lack of purpose and connection destroys a lot of events where attendees or members dwindle, which the author emphasizes. She discusses how to open an event, how to close an event, and what to do in the middle. There’s even a section on how an event may be dying and how to resuscitate it during a break. One section sticks out when the author was at a friend’s funeral and the priest started the service with parking logistics amid everyone’s mourning. It showed the importance of the first words to be uttered to set the tone for an event. She also mentioned how she would end dinner parties with thanking everyone for coming as a hint it was time for them to go home. To resolve this, she and her husband would move the party from the dining room when everyone finished eating into the living room as a soft close. This created a break for the attendees who had to leave, though she would emphasize it was a part of the event, and the ones who stayed would talk and drink until everyone left on their own.

The author again expertly weaves so many personal events since she’s a founder of a transformative event planning agency with professional events. She also sprinkles events she read about in the media with picking out the elements in the article that the average reader probably did not notice. This book is a must-read if you’re interested in coordinating events with care or learning how to do so. It will be a useful guide that you’ll return to when planning events with purpose.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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