The smart, funny At Wit's End is a bible of modern cartooning, capturing the funny people of the New Yorker with pithy profiles, portrait photography and, of course, their own wonderful comics.
The smart, funny At Wit's End is a bible of modern cartooning, capturing the funny people of the New Yorker with pithy profiles, portrait photography and, of course, their own wonderful comics.
Kiera Wright-Ruiz explores a host of Latin American cultures in her richly imagined cookbook-memoir, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen.
Kiera Wright-Ruiz explores a host of Latin American cultures in her richly imagined cookbook-memoir, My (Half) Latinx Kitchen.
Rich Benjamin reckons with his family’s exile from Haiti in his vivid, novelistic memoir, Talk to Me.
Rich Benjamin reckons with his family’s exile from Haiti in his vivid, novelistic memoir, Talk to Me.
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We talked to Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler about her extraordinary new memoir Stray—why it was difficult to write, which memories haunted her and how it changed her perspective on motherhood.
Interview by

My phone interview with the 19th poet laureate of the United States happens just days after a series of national tragedies: the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade at the hands of police officers, crimes that have plunged the world—and Black communities in particular—into grief and rage. These circumstances momentarily shift the direction of our interview, and it is Natasha Trethewey who asks the first pointed question: “How are you holding up?” Her voice is rich with an accent that reminds me of home (we both grew up in states along the Gulf Coast), but it’s also tinged with something else: the bone-deep knowledge of what it means to survive violent, life-shattering loss.

Trethewey has spent much of her career studying tragedies of both national and personal scale, and her seventh book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is no different. It chronicles the life and death of her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was murdered by her second ex-­husband, Joel Grimmette Jr., in 1985. Though several of Trethewey’s poetry collections deal with the subject of her mother’s murder (in particular Native Guard, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007), Memorial Drive is the poet’s first memoir.

The prologue begins with a description of Turnbough’s last professionally taken photograph, in which her black dress is so indistinguishable from the background that her face appears to emerge from darkness “as from the depths of memory.” What follows is a haunting exploration of memory—unpredictable, incomplete and at times obfuscating—through the metaphor of negative space, the area around a subject. Interwoven with the book’s chapters are breathtakingly short vignettes in which Trethewey recalls dreamscapes where her mother is still alive, sometimes older than she was at the time of her death. In the vignette that precedes the first chapter, a piercing light shines from a bullet wound in the center of her mother’s forehead, ringing her face in utter darkness as she asks Trethewey, “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?” 

“I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

The chapters vary drastically in length, from single pages to much longer ones like “Evidence,” which includes transcripts of Turnbough’s final conversations with the man who would kill her only a few days later. During our call, Trethewey explains that she included these because, even when she’s recalling her own painful past, she is, at heart, a historian. “I’m someone who likes documentary evidence,” she says from her home outside Chicago. “I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”

Memorial Drive achieves all of the above, and the reader’s knowledge of how the story will end does nothing to detract from the beauty of its narrative. Trethewey’s life began in racially segregated Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years surrounded by her mother’s large family in a town that often treated her parents’ interracial union with open hostility. Nevertheless, she lived happily, doted on by great-aunts, uncles and her young mother, with whom she spent time alone as her father pursued graduate studies in New Orleans.

Tall and graceful, Gwendolyn Turnbough was a stylish, creative woman who made her own clothes and eagerly supported her daughter’s ambitions. For instance, when they moved to Atlanta shortly after Turnbough’s first divorce, a dark space beneath the stairs in their new apartment frightened young Trethewey until her mother transformed it into a playroom planetarium, complete with a desk, books and a velvet cloth sky with stars made from cardboard and aluminum foil. Years later, when Trethewey shared with the family her dreams of being a writer and her stepfather told her it would never happen, Turnbough openly defied him with the full knowledge of the abuse she might later suffer. “She. Will do. WHATEVER. She wants,” she told him in front of their two children. In every instance, Turnbough worked to make use of the spaces available to her daughter, ensuring that they were nurturing and, when possible, safe. “In some ways,” Trethewey says, “all of my relationship with my mother, up to losing her, was shaping me. I think that the love I had from her gave me the kind of resilience that could help me survive losing her.” 


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial Drive.


And yet, in spite of Turnbough’s efforts, the Atlanta years mapped out in Memorial Drive are warped by violence. Trethewey describes Grimmette’s physical abuse of her mother, but also his secret torture of Trethewey herself when the two of them were alone. Grimmette would force her to pack her things, then take her for long drives along Interstate 285, threatening to abandon her at every turn. On another occasion, he broke the lock on her diary and read its contents, after which Trethewey began addressing her entries to him, sometimes with explosive language.

When asked about writing to her stepfather in that diary, which her mother purchased in an attempt to offer her a private place to process her thoughts, Trethewey laughs. “I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that if I did this, that it would be between us, and it would be this way that I could push back. It wasn’t until much later, once I became a writer, that I began to think about it as a defining moment in terms of me having an audience, or imagining that I was writing for someone to read it. I think that it had everything to do with the writer I became.” This destruction of privacy transformed Trethewey’s personal space into a public one, and the poet began speaking truth to power.

Trethewey’s loss of her mother shortly after turning 19, however, is the point at which she believes the second half of her life began; Turnbough’s death split her daughter’s life into two parts, much like the book itself. “I became a whole other person,” Trethewey tells me. “That’s why I structured things as ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The hardest thing to acknowledge sometimes is I don’t know who I’d be without her death. If you were to say to me, ‘She could come back right now, we could undo that,’ it would mean I’d be the one gone. I don’t know who would be here.” Again, what is missing highlights what is left.

Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life.

This admission reminds Trethewey of a moment that took place shortly after Turnbough escaped her abusive marriage. During a Friday night football game, Grimmette appeared in the stands as Trethewey stood with the other cheerleaders on the field. When she saw him, she waved, and only later discovered that he’d planned to shoot her that night as punishment for her mother leaving. Near the end of this section in Memorial Drive, Trethewey writes that, theoretically, her mother’s murder would have been impossible had Grimmette killed her first, a sentiment she echoes during our call. “For a long time, it felt to me like I had traded my life for hers,” she explains. 

However, loss and self-preservation are never mutually exclusive, and Memorial Drive makes clear that the dead are more than their absence, the blank space where there was once a body, a life. The book ends with the singular image of Turnbough’s still-beating heart, a choice that was influenced by a trip Trethewey took to South Korea. Over the phone, she paraphrases what a local poet told her during her visit. “One does not bury the mother’s body in the ground, but in the chest. Or, like you,” he said, turning to her, “you carry her corpse on your back.” Trethewey admits the observation was, at first, deeply painful, but over the years it has come to represent the ways her mother’s death and life live on. “I have planted my mother like a seed in my chest, in my heart—that’s the living mother,” Trethewey tells me. “The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow. And I carry her corpse on my back at the same time. And I wouldn’t dare put it down, and don’t want to.”

 

Poet Destiny O. Birdsong is author of the forthcoming collection Negotiations (Tin House).

Author photo © Nancy Crampton

Even when she’s recalling her own painful past, Trethewey is, at heart, a historian. “I’m someone who likes documentary evidence,” she says from her home outside Chicago. “I can tell you how remarkable my mother was, and resilient, and strong, and rational. Or I can show you.”
Interview by

In We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper uncovers the true story of Jane Britton, a graduate student in Harvard’s anthropology department who was found dead in her apartment in 1969. This 10-year investigation straddles the line between memoir and mystery, and the result is unlike any true crime book you've read.

We chatted with Cooper about her kinship with Jane, her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.


What is the significance of the book's title, We Keep the Dead Close?
When I first heard the story about Jane Britton’s murder, the rumor was that she had been murdered by her adviser with whom she was allegedly having an affair. Though that rumor would eventually prove false, that professor was a real person who still taught at Harvard. I decided to audit his class, and during one of his lessons, he said, in reference to the people of ’Ain Mallaha, “They kept the dead close.” The people of that settlement had buried their loved ones under the living areas in their houses. In fact, archaeologists believe that the population’s beliefs and ritual behavior were the reasons people settled there, rather than agriculture.

Even in that moment, back in 2012, I knew the quote would play a significant role in Jane’s story. It encapsulated so many things. I loved the idea that remembering the dead was maybe one of the earliest marks of our humanity. I also loved how ambiguous the nature of “keeping something close” is. Are you hiding it? Are you defending yourself with it? Is it an act of nostalgia? A tribute?

Over the course of working on the book, the ambiguity of that closeness mirrored the myriad ways people relate to the past, and to the dead specifically. How does someone grieve? How does someone honor what came before? Is it through telling and retelling the story of that person? Or is it by refusing to talk about it and, in that way, refusing to wield that story for your own purposes? The stories of our past and the stories of our dead can be molded, as that same professor said in class, to suit the demands of the present. I wanted the book to be an exploration of the ways in which we—as individuals, historians, detectives and archaeologists—keep our dead close, and what that reveals about who we are and what society we live in.

“I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent—when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community.”

Your kinship with Jane Britton is woven throughout the book. Now that the mystery of her murder is seemingly solved and your book is complete, do you still feel that closeness?
Jane still feels like a very dear friend (if you can say that without knowing if the other person would have liked you at all), but I don’t feel the same hallucinatory blurring I did at the height of researching and writing the book. When I was retyping the cache of Jane’s letters, for example, Jane felt as real to me as my own past did. It didn’t help that I was still adjusting to life at Harvard, and I felt surrounded by the ghosts of what had come before. But the new distance between us feels less like a loss than like she’s let me be at peace.

I think part of it is the resolution I feel from finishing her story, but another part of it is that the book captures me at a slightly younger stage of life. One reason I was able to channel Jane was that she and I shared a lot of the same essential preoccupations: a fear of being unlovable in some fundamental way, an inexplicable loneliness, a yearning to feel like I was made of a cohesive whole. I knew instinctively that I had to finish the book before I forgot those worries and that yearning, and before I fell happily in love.

In the year since finishing the first draft, I’ve felt more at peace with myself than I think Jane ever had the chance to feel. In other words, I was allowed to get older, and that fact only underlines the unfairness that Jane’s world stopped at 23.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of We Keep the Dead Close.


Intense experiences, such as those involving death, can unexpectedly bind people together. Have you developed friendships with anyone you interviewed for the book?
I feel very close to a number of the people in the book. Mike Widmer (the former journalist who was also pushing for the Middlesex records) would get coffee with me every few months or so at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square. I visited Don Mitchell (Jane’s friend and neighbor) for Labor Day weekend. Stephen Loring (Anne Abraham’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance), thank goodness, still sends me postcards.

But I’ve been hesitant to blur the line from journalist into friend completely before the book comes out. Janet Malcolm’s warning that all journalism is an act of betrayal (forgive the paraphrase) preys on my mind. I wanted to be able to write an honest book, and I didn’t want the people in the book to forget that I came into their lives first and foremost as a journalist. I also wanted to limit how bereft I would feel if and when those people were dissatisfied with my account and ended our relationship. My hope, though, is that they will read the book, we will have an honest discussion, and we’ll be able to form a friendship on a foundation that isn’t transactional in nature.

We Keep the Dead CloseYour undergraduate thesis was a biography of David Foster Wallace. What did you learn (either emotionally or practically speaking) about researching a person’s life and death from doing your thesis?
I was terrified by the idea of writing my thesis about David Foster Wallace. It felt too personal and too daunting. I toyed with the idea of writing about maps—some safe, literary-theory friendly chapters about the politics of memory and space. But the idea of writing about Wallace just wore me down through its insistence. So I guess what I learned most is that I should lean into the feeling of feverish identification, because the desire to write my way through it isn’t going to go anywhere. In fact, writing what scares and haunts me is the only way I imagine I’ll care enough about the material for the time it takes to write it.

The other thing I learned is not to allow admiration for my subject to blind me to that person’s flaws and inconsistencies. My thesis was too hagiographic; I idolized Wallace and failed to examine his treatment of women, for example. I’ve tried to correct that with Jane. My love for her was made deeper by an exploration of her complexities, and I’ve tried to convey that in the book.

Was We Keep the Dead Close your first foray into investigative journalism?
In terms of investigative journalism that I’ve actually published—yes, this book is my first foray into investigative journalism. The book is a meta kind of bildungsroman in that way, with the coming-of-age part partially about learning how to be a journalist. When I say that I shaped my life around Jane, I truly did, for about eight years, make every decision based on whether it led me closer to finishing her story.

Were there points along the way in the 10 years it took to write this book when an aspect of the research felt insurmountable and you thought about giving up? If so, how did you push past it?
The moment I think I came closest to putting the book project down was after I spoke with Jane's brother, Boyd, for the first time and he painted a picture of Jane that was at odds with who I had imagined her to be. It wasn't that I ever expected her to be a perfect victim—not that there is one—but I had so subconsciously identified with her that I was thrown off by her stubborn refusal to be me. Obviously I needed to take a moment to both get to know her on her own terms and also come to terms with the fact that I had been projecting myself onto her. I wasn't just too close; I had been blind. To do this right, I had to get to know her separately from who I wanted her to be. Would I still feel so deeply passionate about her story if that illusion of oneness was dissolved? The rupture took a few months of space and reflection to cauterize.

Was it helpful to be working at the New Yorker for a period of time, surrounded by some of the world’s best journalists, while you were writing this book? Or was researching a story of this magnitude difficult to do while working at a demanding full-time job?
When I took the job at the New Yorker, I had just started my first real round of reporting. I had spoken to Boyd, Elisabeth Handler and Ingrid Kirsch and visited the archives for the first time. I worried that taking an office job at that point was a kind of cloaked cowardice; I was walking away from the story while telling myself I was walking toward it. The job was a two-year commitment.

I'm so grateful I said yes, though. While the job did take me away from the book in some sense—I had to wait two and a half years before going on my reporting trip out west, and I had to relegate research to mornings and weekends––I don't think I could have done this book without it. The opportunity at the New Yorker was extraordinary.

Partially, I had been so exhausted trying to make ends meet in New York City that I didn’t have the energy to fully devote all my resources to Jane anyway. I felt like I needed a place to moor. Professionally, the generosity of the New Yorker staff was both unexpected and unparalleled. And finally, when I cold-called people in Jane's life, being able to say that, yes, I'm only 20-something years old, but I have the credibility of the New Yorker magazine behind me, was a complete game changer in terms of what doors were open to me.

Were you initially thinking this story could be a magazine article, or did you suspect from the beginning that We Keep the Dead Close would be a book-length narrative?
At the beginning, I wasn't thinking in terms of a writing project. Her death felt less like a mystery and more like an open secret, and it bothered me that people believed the rumor enough to repeat it but not enough to do anything about it. I wanted to be the one to take it seriously. As the story became more complex, I felt compelled to pursue it as far as it would go, even if the chances of solving the crime were increasingly slim. I hoped I would at least find peace with the project. That trail took years to follow. It started to change my identity by guiding all my decisions. Naturally then, as the narrative took shape, it blew past the outlines of anything other than a book-length story.

“No one person is the source for the authoritative version of history. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered.”

For many journalists who write about sexual violence and violence against women, the work can feel emotionally draining and despairing. Was this your experience while researching Jane Britton and Anne Abraham (another young archaeologist who disappeared in 1976)? If so, how did you cope with it?
I don't know whether it was conscious, but instead of focusing on the loss of Jane and Anne and the injustice of what their early deaths deprived them of, I focused on how lucky I felt to be spending time with women like them. I relished every moment I got to read another poetic journal entry or speak to the people with whom they had surrounded themselves. I don’t think I could have worked on this book for 10 years without the sense of hope I found in that community. The solace we felt in finding each other was extremely buoying.

You are critical of the entertainment aspect that can crop up within the true crime genre. What was your relationship to the true crime genre while working on this book?
I didn’t intentionally position the book to be a commentary on the true crime genre. It’s true that I have trouble with true crime when it’s salacious or gratuitously violent, when it’s entertainment consumed without a sense of the victim’s humanity or the loss suffered by his or her community or when the genre glorifies the killer. But rather than writing a book in the negative (i.e., I never said, “I don’t want to write a book that . . .”), I just set out to write one I would want to read.

The books I’m drawn to are rich character studies and philosophical explorations of moral ambiguity. The north stars for my book include In Cold Blood (though not in terms of the journalistic liberties Capote took), Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, Maggie Nelson’s Jane and The Red Parts and Melanie Thernstrom’s The Dead Girl. But my inspirations were also genre and form agnostic. The literary devices and character explorations in the book are equally indebted to "The Keepers," "Twin Peaks," Jelani Cobb’s This American Life segment “Show Me State of Mind,” Anna Burns’ Milkman, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Lolita, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and Laurent Binet’s HHhH.

It may seem odd, but I sometimes didn’t even classify We Keep the Dead Close as a true crime book in my mind. It was a biography of Jane occasioned by her death, or a portrait of her community as impacted by the crime. In fact, that shared understanding was one of the reasons I decided to work with my editor Maddie Caldwell, who, from the very first meeting, focused more on the book’s repetition of the ritual motif rather than on its entry in the true crime genre.

You went down a lot of rabbit holes in your research and mentioned in another interview that your first draft came in 30% too long. What was a rabbit hole that you found fascinating but didn’t/couldn’t delve into?
I had always been intrigued by the whispers that there was some kind of government connection to the Iranian dig that Jane participated in the summer before her death. After all, the second time I heard the story about Jane was during a discussion of how commonly archaeology had been used as a cover for espionage. This avenue of speculation wasn't helped by the fact that the CIA was the only agency I queried that gave a glomar response. (This means they could neither confirm nor deny the existence of files relating to either Jane or to Tepe Yahya.)

Research led me to a man named Ted Wertime, who was the head of metallurgical survey team at Tepe Yahya in 1968 when Jane was there. It was thanks to Wertime that the Iranian expedition secured U.S. commissary privileges. He had been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. And he was, for a time, the cultural attaché in Iran, which is about as stereotypical as you can get for a CIA cover. Finally, according to his son's memoir, when the son learned that Wertime had died, his first thought was, “You're finally safe.”

I ultimately got nowhere with that line of research; I could find no evidence that Wertime was still working in intelligence at the time of the dig, and the Harvard professor who ran Tepe Yahya vehemently denied ever working for the U.S. government. Without any of the dots connecting, I couldn’t justify putting any more than a hint of it in the main text, where it serves more as a reminder of my state of mind. A little is relegated to the source notes.

The two books you’ve written so far (Mapping Manhattan and We Keep the Dead Close) are extremely different. Do you have plans for a third book, and if so, can you tell us what it will be about?
On the surface, I completely agree that my books are very different, but I think what bonds them is the idea that no one person is the source for the authoritative version of either history or of a map. It's important to collect myriad perspectives in order to capture an event as it's remembered—or a city as it’s lived. I imagine anything I write will land close to this territory.

As for what comes next, I have a few things in mind, and I’m waiting to see if they’ll gain mass and inevitability. I’m especially curious to see if I can find something that is endlessly interesting but doesn't require what feels like soul scraping. I would love to be surprised.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover all the best new true crime.


Author headshot © Lily Erlinger

We chatted with Becky Cooper about her true crime masterpiece, We Keep the Dead Close, her kinship with Jane, her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.
Interview by

Maria Hinojosa’s masterful book on American immigration and her own family story is a must-read in its own right, but the Mexican American author is also the anchor and executive producer of NPR’s program "Latino USA," and she brings that knowledge and experience to her performance of the Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America audiobook. It’s moving, funny, heartbreaking, informative and utterly captivating, making it one of the best audiobooks of the year. Here Hinojosa discusses her role as narrator, which allowed her to fall back in love with her own book.

As you were writing the book, were you imagining the way it would be delivered on audio?
I was absolutely not thinking about the audiobook when I was writing! It would’ve been too hard for me to even begin to think that way. The upside for me, however, is that I am always reading things out loud while I’m writing, because that’s what I do for work. As a radio journalist, at some point, everything I’ve written I have said out loud. If it doesn’t roll off my tongue, that’s when I might change something, especially if it doesn’t sound right. But I never thought about the audiobook when I was writing my book.

“A writer is always so conflicted about their work, so it was liberating to be able to be in this space of my words, without being judgmental or changing anything.”

Was there any question that you would narrate the audiobook? If so, what was that process like?
For me, it was an absolute given to narrate the audiobook, but I have to be honest with you: It was one of the things that I felt the most overwhelmed by! I’ve never had to read something as massive as an entire book, and the thought of doing that was actually quite terrifying and overwhelming.

Tell us about transforming your book into an audiobook. How did you prepare?
I prepared like I was going to run a marathon. Even though I felt very overwhelmed by the number of hours it would take for me to record, I had to convince myself that I was going to make it! The pandemic forced me to transform one of the bedrooms in my home into a studio, but in order to work I have to ask everybody in the entire household to be quiet when we record. There was just no way that I could have asked the entire household to be quiet for five hours at a time, much less make the street noise disappear.

In a sense, recording the audiobook was my first break from this psychological barrier of “working from home,” as it marked my return to the office studio. I prepared myself with a lot of tea and my dog, who sat on my lap for about half of the recordings when he wasn’t noisy.

And then there were other parts, like preparing for the more emotional parts of the book. There’s really no way to prepare for that. In fact, my emotions caught me off guard a few times, I just couldn’t help it.

Did narrating your memoir change your relationship to it in any way?
Yes! I fell in love with my book.

A writer is always so conflicted about their work, so it was liberating to be able to be in this space of my words, without being judgmental or changing anything. I vividly remembered the ideas that I had, where I was when I had them, how I imagined this moment of holding this book, I was emotionally connected to it. I reflected on the story of my arrival, and then my time as a young woman. I cried during the scene of my rape, and I found myself rooting for my character as I read on! I laugh about it now because I am the character, she is me! The process of narrating completely transformed my relationship to the memoir, even after I never imagined that it would.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of the Once I Was You audiobook, plus more great audio recommendations.


Did you picture a specific audience to whom you were performing, and did the relationship to your perceived audience change through this performance?
Imagine this story as if you were telling it to your mother.

I always write with this in mind. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily work when writing a memoir, but it helps to focus on telling the story to one person. I didn’t have an image of a reader, per se, but I knew that I had to use my voice to connect to them. When you connect to somebody’s writing, it is powerful because it is such an intimate experience, but imagine an added element—the element of your voice. You can use your own voice to exude sensuality, anger, love, raw emotions. I go into the studio a lot, so doing this wasn’t particularly hard for me. I just close my eyes and go into a space.

We can demand that silenced voices need to be heard, that untold history needs to be brought to light, but to hear your voice narrate Once I Was You drives it home, from the strength you imbue into your mother’s voice to the sly tone with which you skewer hypocrisy and racism. Did you have any goals for your narration?
As you may know, I wanted to be an actor, so I have learned to understand the power of my voice figuratively and literally. I have to be honest and say there were moments when I wanted to just keep reading and get through it. But then there were other moments where I wanted to be a good actor, and it turns out I was actually just being my most authentic self! I really wanted to entertain you and draw you in with my voice, use it in the way that radio journalists know we can and share this feeling with the reader.

Once I Was YouWas there a section of your memoir that proved most difficult to narrate, and how did you get through it?
The hardest part of my narration was when I read about my assault. I cried. It took me a while to get through it, maybe because of the way I wrote it. It was very graphic and one of the parts of the book that I wrote while crying. It felt like the scab was off, and I was diffing deeper into my wounds when I talked about this moment and others.

It was hard, but I also felt like I needed to go through that pain as part of my therapy. I needed it to heal. It was hard to relive the moment of almost being taken from my mom, and writing about my dad (may he rest in peace) while feeling him coming toward me. That was hard.

What do you believe is the most rewarding or coolest thing you get to bring to the reading of your book?
I get to bring my drama! I really wanted to bring my entire personality with the book, let loose and be funny, silly, capturing the laughter or cynicism. When writing, you try to take people into those spaces, but when you get to record your audiobook, it’s all about getting people there faster! I loved it!

Are you a frequent audio listener? What role do audiobooks play in your life?
To tell you the truth, I don’t do audiobooks, and I don’t know why! For me, reading a book is in the pleasure of the reading because it’s like a sixth sense that I’m using. I’ve almost felt like I need somebody to initiate me into audiobooks with the best audiobook there is out there to listen to because I am all about having the book in my hand, like the actual book. Even digital books sometimes don’t do it for me. There’s something that’s a little bit less satisfying about them. But I am prepared to try an audiobook because I’m prepared to give my fans an opportunity to tell me which audiobook is the best I can start with!

 

Author photo by Kevin Abosch

Author Maria Hinojosa’s performance of the Once I Was You audiobook is moving, funny, informative, heartbreaking and utterly captivating. Here she discusses her role as narrator, which allowed her to fall back in love with her own book.

Comedian, screenwriter, actor and showrunner Rachel Bloom adds “author” to her list of credentials with I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are, a collection of personal essays and hilarious tidbits from her life and career.
Interview by

An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past.

“Whenever I see a magpie flying overhead, in the back of my mind, I think it’s going to come and land on my shoulder,” says Charlie Gilmour, speaking by phone from West Sussex, England.

Such thoughts are hardly surprising, given that Gilmour and his partner once nursed an abandoned chick and raised her to adulthood. The magpie, whom they named Benzene, took over and transformed Gilmour’s life, helping him come to terms with the fact that when he was 6 months old, his biological father, Heathcote Williams, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned Gilmour and his mother.

Heathcote, who died in 2017, was a poet, actor and political activist, as well as an amateur magician with a knack for disappearing. Although Gilmour met him a handful of times, he never really got to know him. Gilmour describes his stellar debut, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, as “the conversation we never had.” Writing about his father came somewhat naturally, Gilmour says, because “in one sense, he has always been a character in my imagination.”


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Featherhood.


Though he just turned 31, Gilmour sounds infinitely wiser than his years. He, his wife and their child, Olga, have been weathering the pandemic with Gilmour’s mother, writer and lyricist Polly Samson, and his adoptive father, David Gilmour, the renowned musician of Pink Floyd fame. Commenting on his creative, colorful family, Gilmour admits, “I was very, very fortunate to have quite a cast of characters to play around with—quite a few larger-than-life people.”

By far the star of the memoir, however, is Benzene, who had free rein of Gilmour’s London home, stealing trinkets left and right while leaving droppings everywhere, often in Gilmour’s long, dark, curly hair. One time the brazen bird even plucked a contact lens right out of the eye of their visiting friend, a photographer. “Benzene had this weird knack of being able to know what people value, and then she would go for it,” Gilmour muses. Despite such antics, he never considered caging the magpie. “She wouldn’t have stood for it in any case,” he says. “She would’ve shouted the house down.”

Gilmour began honing his writing skills while he himself was caged— in prison. In 2011, during a state he describes as “possessed of maniacal energy and messianic purpose,” he was part of widespread student protests in London against raises in tuition. The 21-year-old was later arrested for violent disorder and sent to prison for four months, followed by additional time on house arrest. “People are often punished when actually what they need is some form of treatment,” he says.

“I think

 one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”

One bright spot during his sentence was a box of books he received from Elton John and his husband, David Furnish. “I’d never met either of them in my life,” Gilmour says, but he devoured their gift, which featured prison classics including War and Peace and Crime and Punishment. The gift of books “was a very generous and kind gesture,” he says. “I think it’s one of the few things you can do for someone in prison. . . . It gives them the opportunity to at least very briefly escape from where they are.”

While imprisoned, Gilmour kept a daily journal, and he continued writing after his release. Several years later, when Benzene became part of his life, the bird’s presence intensified his need to know—and understand—his biological father. He learned that Heathcote had also rescued a young bird not long before Gilmour’s birth, a jackdaw that he kept as a pet.

In a mysterious moment that seems straight out of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Gilmour says that when he was in the midst of writing the scene about Heathcote’s death for his book, he heard “a cacophony of screams from all the crows and jackdaws and rooks around me.” He recalls, “I ran towards the noise, and there was this angry cloud of corvids over the field, and underneath them, red kites [birds of prey] were standing over a jackdaw. I ran towards them and snatched the jackdaw off the red kites, and the jackdaw just died right there in my hands. It felt like this incredibly eerie coincidence considering I had just, in writing, killed my biological father.”

“After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed."

Featherhood also explores Gilmour’s own journey into fatherhood. “I love being father to this child,” he says of Olga, now 2. “It’s a joy. And it also makes me very sad that this joy was something that Heathcote couldn’t allow himself to experience.” One of Heathcote’s favorite quotations was Cyril Connolly’s adage, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” but Gilmour has found the opposite to be true. Somehow he became a more efficient writer after Olga’s birth, often attending to her needs at 4 a.m. and then writing for two or three hours. “It also feels like a bit of an f-you,” Gilmour admits. “I was going to prove him wrong by writing this book while the pram was very much in the hallway.”

As it turns out, nurturing Benzene was excellent preparation for fatherhood. “She taught me a lot about what it means to love and care for another creature,” Gilmour says. And of course, both birds and toddlers can be distracted by shiny objects.

As much as Gilmour treasures the time he spent with Benzene, he doesn’t endorse keeping wild birds as pets. “After four years of it, I can safely say that the best place for birds is in the trees—not sleeping above your bed, defecating on you as you yourself sleep. . . . I loved her, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone else.”

 

Author photo by Polly Samson

An abandoned baby bird helps a talented new writer come to terms with his past in Featherhood.

In Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, Dr. Carl L. Hart makes a thoughtful and persuasive (if controversial) case that everything we’ve been taught about drug use is wrong and that it’s high time we legalize all drugs and consider a more humane way forward.

Interview by

For Anna Malaika Tubbs, finding the inspiration to write her first book was a numbers game. After watching Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama about Black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the space race, Tubbs left the movie theater feeling both enraged and inspired. “I wanted to do something where I helped this issue of uncovering more ‘hidden figures,’ ” she says from her home in Stockton, California. She wanted to write about women who “were there right in front of us that we just weren’t paying more attention to, or who were intentionally being kept from us.”

With a background in sociology and gender studies, Tubbs was well positioned for the task. But she also knew that, in order to entice readers, she would need more than her sharp research skills; she would need a hook. So she turned to Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin and Malcolm X, three of the most brilliant leaders of the 20th century. Then she looked at their mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin and Louise Little, respectively. 


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Three Mothers.


When Tubbs learned that these women had been born roughly six years apart (though some accounts of their birth years vary) and that their sons were born within five years of one another, she knew she had uncovered an important connective thread. She followed it, and the result is The Three Mothers, a book that maps how misogynoir (the unique intersection of racism and misogyny experienced by Black women) shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement. The Three Mothers discusses Louise’s work with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Alberta’s family history of faith-based activism and Berdis’ early years as a poet and spoken-word artist. As such, the book is part biography, part history and part running social commentary on the events of the past century. People might pick it up because they are interested in these iconic men, but what they will discover is an extensive and rewarding history of 20th-­century Black women.

Tubbs intentionally wrote The Three Mothers in language that is counterintuitive to her academic training. After countless days in special collections archives, poring over newspaper clippings, letters and interviews, Tubbs wanted to create something accessible to those outside the ivory tower, where emerging scholars are often encouraged to make their work “as elitist and complicated and boring as possible,” as she puts it. Because the activism of King, Baldwin, Malcolm X and their mothers was intended to benefit all people, Tubbs considered it unreasonable to write a text that was accessible to only a few. “I’m just not willing to play that part,” she says. 

In fact, The Three Mothers is the first step down what Tubbs calls the “public intellectual path” she has always wanted to take, sharing knowledge with people both within and outside the academy. With its conversational style and anecdotal imaginings of moments for which firsthand information is scarce, The Three Mothers tells a captivating story of women traumatized by the nation they and their sons would ultimately help transform.

In addition to shedding light on the lives of Alberta, Berdis and Louise, Tubbs also illuminates Black motherhood in general. Tubbs, who became a mother herself while writing the book, intimately understands what an undervalued vocation motherhood can be. Tubbs is the partner of Stockton’s first Black mayor, Michael Tubbs, and people often congratulate her high-­profile husband on the birth of “his” son while saying little to acknowledge the roles that she or her mother-in-law have played in the mayor’s personal and political success. Tubbs suspects this is because many people still assume that Black motherhood is neither an intellectually rigorous nor actively anti-racist endeavor, but she hopes her book can change that. “Black motherhood is about creation, liberation and thinking about the possibilities of the world that we can be a part of,” she says. “So many times our kids are painted as not human, and of course we see them as the most incredible humans in the world. Therefore, we have to change the world to see it the way we do.”

"Black women hold the truth and the key to the future."

This is illustrated time and time again in The Three Mothers as Tubbs explores how each woman worked to make her son see himself differently from the world’s harsh perceptions. For instance, Louise would reteach school lessons to Malcolm and his siblings to incorporate multiple languages and Afro-diasporic history. When a frightened young King and his father were harassed by white store clerks and policemen, Alberta would comfort her son but remind him that his father’s refusal to be treated like a second-class citizen was the right thing to do. And when a young Baldwin and his siblings were terrorized by his stepfather, Berdis stepped in, continually reminding her son that family solidarity and the fair treatment of others were important in spite of the abuse. In each of the book’s eight sections, Tubbs makes clear that, without these mothers’ instruction, none of the men born to them could have been the leaders they ultimately became.

Though Tubbs is both excited and anxious about this spring—she will defend her doctoral dissertation and launch her debut book within weeks of each other—she feels that now is the perfect time for her work to enter the world, and she has high hopes for The Three Mothers. “I want it to be that declaration that Black women hold the truth and the key to the future. People are quite open to that idea, maybe for the first time,” she says, citing the recent inauguration of the first Black woman U.S. vice president as proof that the conversation is ripe for change. 

There’s no doubt that The Three Mothers will be at the forefront of that changing conversation about Black womanhood, perhaps leaving readers as inspired and determined as Tubbs was when she walked out of the movie theater nearly five years ago.

 

Author photo credit, Anna Maliaka Tubbs

The Three Mothers maps how misogynoir shaped the lives of three young civil rights activists long before they raised sons who would become leaders in the movement.
Author Julia Cooke shares her thoughts on air travel, past and present, and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.

To celebrate Memoir March, we spoke to the authors of this spring’s most exciting memoirs about their research processes, writing roadblocks and biggest fears as they put their personal stories out into the world. Elizabeth Miki Brina shares some of the joys and difficulties behind her book, Speak, Okinawa, about whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization.


What do you love most about your book?
I love how my book aims to capture more than my life and my story—or rather, how my life and my story encompass so many other lives and stories, including my mother’s story, my father’s story, the history of the people of Okinawa. Through writing this book, I love how I was able to realize the connectedness of it all, to understand myself and my place in this world, the events that had to transpire, the hardships that had to be endured and overcome in order for me to exist.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?
Readers who are children of immigrants. Readers who are biracial or have multicultural heritage. Readers who were once estranged from their mothers or fathers and therefore from their origins. Readers who want to witness this experience.

What is one thing in your book that’s true that readers may have a hard time believing?
I hope readers don’t have a hard time believing anything—but what was hard for me to believe is how I really didn’t know myself for most of my life. I avoided and denied such important aspects of my identity for so long, and that took a huge toll on me and greatly hindered my ability to love and be loved. Still does. I grew up trying to believe that race, family history and cultural history were inconsequential. I’m glad I don’t believe that anymore.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Speak, Okinawa.


What resistance did you face while writing this book?
I got nothing but support and encouragement from others as I was writing this book. The resistance I faced was from myself: deciding what personal details to share or not share, deciding what was mine or not mine to tell, and knowing that these decisions would affect and alter the narrative as well as the reader’s perception of and attitude toward the people being portrayed. That is a great deal of responsibility I didn’t want to abuse. Kept me awake some nights.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?
I was surprised by how much I remembered, and how much my perspective on memories shifted as I was writing, rewriting and revising. There were so many revelations I could only have reached by putting memories on paper, seeing them reflected back at me, trying to view them objectively and finding the precise words to describe them.

Is there anything in your book that you’re nervous for people to read?
I’m definitely nervous for my parents to read the book. I’m nervous for them to read their secrets. I hope they forgive me.

“In a memoir, I can be judged and evaluated and hopefully redeemed as me, a real person, not a fictional character.”

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?
I feel very scraped out but also fuller and more complete. I feel relief.

What’s one way that your book is better as a memoir than it would have been as a novel?
In a memoir, I can claim my experiences and observations as my own. I can be judged and evaluated and hopefully redeemed as me, a real person, not a fictional character.

Many people think writing memoir means you just write from memory and don’t have to do research, but obviously that’s not true. What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?
Everything I researched was interesting to me. The history of Okinawa, which I hadn’t learned before writing the book and which helped me better understand myself and my mother. The life of my mother, which I hadn’t learned about before writing the book either. Our conservations, asking and answering questions, helped heal our relationship and brought us closer.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

 

Author photo credit: Thad Lee

Elizabeth Miki Brina shares some of the joys and difficulties behind her memoir, Speak, Okinawa, about whether love can heal a family traumatized by racism and colonization.
Courtney Zoffness shares some of the joys and difficulties behind her book, Spilt Milk, a collection of essays that plaits her life experiences with larger observations about society.

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