-Congratulations on the book. It's fantastic.
It was inspired by -- I hope I'm getting this right,
literary sketches done by James McCune Smith,
and what was it about his work that inspired you
to try to write this work?
-My husband's actually a researcher at a university,
and he constantly comes into the living room like
Sophia Petrillo and just says like,
"Picture this, 1864..."
and tells these really ridiculous stories
about black people.
"We weren't free. Think about it,"
and so he was talking a lot about James McCune Smith's work,
and I was realizing how many things are not that different
unfortunately from the 19th century and now
from listening to him.
So I wanted to read the sketches,
and then kind of, update them.
I eventually found that a little bit too restrictive,
so I just wrote to the theme of heads more generally,
I liked his title, and I stole it, basically.
-Okay yeah, that's totally allowed.
-Yeah. -You write about --
There are a lot of themes that roll through this work --
chronic illness, class, race,
but race is never sort of the main definer in every piece,
is that accurate to say?
-Yeah. I think the collection
kind of exemplifies intersectionality.
Everyone is black and something.
So they're black and disabled,
they're black and living with a chronic illness,
they're black and a nerd.
There are a lot of blerds in there, black nerds.
They're black and cosplayers.
So I kind of wanted to tell those other black stories
that I hadn't seen so much.
-You say you haven't seen them so much.
Was this an issue where these were stories you'd never seen,
and you thought, "Oh, I have the power to represent stories
that haven't existed before?"
-I don't know if I thought about it as power,
but I definitely felt that there was a gap
in what I wished I could have been reading,
and Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, other people I've talked about,
if there's a gap in something, you fill it in.
So I was kind of following that advice and telling
the stories I wished I could have been reading.
-You know, we've obviously mentioned things
like chronic illness, and, well, again,
race is a big part of this.
There's some very dark stories you tell in this book,
but all have sort of a lovely humor to them.
Is that something that's always been true of your writing,
to bring humor into dark subject matter?
-I use humor I think as my own defense mechanism.
And I really wanted to be
a stand-up comedian when I was a kid.
Not a good day to say that when Wanda Sykes is on the show
and David Cross is on the show. [ Laughter ]
But I couldn't watch the really good comedians like Eddie Murphy
and Richard Pryor. I wasn't allowed to do that.
So I was watching people like Dave Coulier on "Full House,"
and I was taking his material as Uncle Joey,
and going to school, going like, "Cut it out,"
and just being horrible,
and wondering why people were making fun of me.
-Yeah. -But I found that when they were
laughing at me, any kind of laughter sort of calmed me down,
and so it became a mechanism for me to deal with
my own anxiety, and I think the stories do that, too.
-There's a wonderful story in here
that is a series of letters back and forth
between two mothers who are -- basically, one is saying,
"Your daughter bullied my daughter at school,"
and it escalates as the letters go back and forth.
This is inspired by real life?
-Sadly, yes. My mother sent me a box
of kind of crap that she called a care packet,
and one of the things that was in it
was a letter from my childhood bully's mother,
and I was the only other black girl in the class,
so two black mothers at a very bourgie white school.
Two black daughters in this grade,
and the other mother basically said that I brought
all of the drama to the school,
and that her daughter was perfect,
and so when she sent me the letter, I was like,
"Why did you send me this, first of all,
and second, I'm going to make fun of you for this,"
and that's what I'm basically doing in this story.
-Did your mother stand up for you?
Is she someone that would write an angry letter back?
-Yes. My mother -- If anyone did anything to me,
like you weren't invited to this birthday party,
they're going to get a letter.
My mother is a letter writer,
like four-page, scathing letters.
She's an expert at that.
And she has written to everyone --
Airlines who have done her wrong,
Orville Redenbacher for popcorn kernels
that were unpopped in her microwave popcorn bags.
-Really? -Anything. Yeah.
-Wow, did the Redenbacher people ever get back to you?
-She got a year of free popcorn.
-Okay, gotcha.
[ Laughter and applause ]
-The power of letters. The power of letter writing.
I'm always fascinated when we have authors on the show
to talk about their writing process,
and I've heard that you write with the TV on,
which seems incredibly distracting to me.
How do you make it work?
-It's kind of my white noise.
I really like the TV. I like to watch really trashy TV.
So no offense, but "Paternity Court"
is one of my favorite things to watch.
-Wow. -People are fighting,
and it's just so juicy.
How are you not inspired by watching people, like,
tell all of their business on TV,
and not even care about their children?
[ Laughter ]
The other thing I really like to watch is the old "90210"
because it's kind of campy and soapy
and all the things at once.
-I'm glad I heard that after I read the book
because it would have been weird to read it going,
"Oh, she was watching '90210.'"
[ Laughter ]
Thank you so much for being here.
Congrats on the book again. -Oh, thank you.
-It's a real pleasure talking to you.
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