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The 12 best biographies of 2024

Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Custodians of Wonder

Eliot Stein’s vivid Custodians of Wonder documents the last people maintaining some of the world’s ancient cultural traditions, and proves that comfort, community and beauty never get old.
Eliot Stein’s vivid Custodians of Wonder documents the last people maintaining some of the world’s ancient cultural traditions, and proves that comfort, community and beauty never get old.
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Danielle Henderson

Danielle Henderson reflects on a memoir’s ability to create connection, and connection’s ability to heal old wounds.
NonfictionBlack HistoryAmerican History

Clint Smith

Interview by Alden Mudge

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America is a must-read, grew up in New Orleans. He remembers frequently passing the city’s Robert E. Lee monument, riding along Jefferson Davis Parkway and attending a middle school named for Robert Mills Lusher, another leader of the Confederacy. 

Speaking by phone from Washington, D.C., Smith tells me that when his hometown removed Confederate statues and memorials in 2017, he began wondering, “What does it mean that I grew up in a city, a majority Black city, in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people? How does that happen, and what does the process of reckoning with that look like?”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of How the Word Is Passed.

By that moment in 2017, Smith had given up his lifelong quest to become a professional soccer player (he was good but not quite good enough) and turned to literature, writing and performing slam poetry “just as obsessively as 15-year-old me stayed up until 3 a.m. watching second division [soccer] teams from the Netherlands on cable TV.” He had also published an award-winning book of poetry and taught high school English, and he assumed he would teach for the next 30 years. “I loved talking about literature with teenagers,” he says.

But Smith’s teaching experiences had raised larger questions about the role of education in our society. He began reading widely about the philosophy and practice of education by writers who were “thinking about using the classroom to help students understand that the world is a social construction,” he says. “It can be deconstructed and reconstructed into something new. The essence of that is that you don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

Pursuing this interest further, Smith entered a multidisciplinary Ph.D. program at Harvard. During graduate school, he freelanced for The New Yorker, the New Republic and the Atlantic (where he’s now a staff writer) as a way to distill the history and theory he was learning in the classroom into a more approachable format.

“You don’t have to accept the world as an inevitability. It can be transformed.”

After New Orleans removed its Confederate statues in 2017, Smith began writing a series of daily poems to explore issues around “growing up surrounded by Confederate iconography,” he says. He eventually decided the subject needed something lengthier and wrote two prose chapters, but he was unsatisfied with the results. Then a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, which Smith details in the brilliantly prismatic first chapter of his book, presented him with the format for How the Word Is Passed: Talk to people. Respectfully, interestedly. And do enough research to contextualize their stories and delineate the difference between history and nostalgia.

“When I went to Monticello in the summer of 2018, I had never done a lot of reporting,” Smith says. “I’m not someone who walks up to strangers and asks them questions. That’s not a part of my natural ethos. But I did that at Monticello, and it transformed what I hoped the book could do. My own ideas about what these people and places meant had to be in conversation with what these people and places meant to other people.”

Some visitors he talked to were astonished, sometimes disheartened, to learn of the moral inconsistencies of Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who, like so many of the Founding Fathers, owned enslaved people. Recent scholarship has revealed that Jefferson fathered children with enslaved women, most notably Sally Hemings, and kept his children enslaved. In fact, Smith found his book’s title in the oral history of Hemings’ descendants. 

“Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes.”

In recent years, Monticello has made an effort to tell the stories of the people Jefferson owned alongside the story of Jefferson himself. But not all the historical sites of enslavement that Smith visited for his book—Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, Blandford Cemetery for Confederate veterans in Virginia, the African Burial Ground in New York City, the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal and others—probe their complicated histories as much as Monticello does. Smith’s fascinating, nuanced book illuminates this struggle to acknowledge and reckon with these histories on both individual and societal levels.

“My grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved,” Smith says. “My grandmother’s grandfather was born right after emancipation. The history that we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn’t in fact that long ago. Slavery existed for a hundred years longer in this country than it has not existed. We forget that sometimes. We forget how much it shaped this country. We forget the extent to which that past is still with us.”

 

Author photo credit © Carletta Girma

Clint Smith, whose spellbinding debut nonfiction book is a must-read, shares his thoughts on reckoning with Confederate landmarks and locations where Black people were enslaved.
NonfictionSocial Science

Amanda Montell

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

A cultish group is one that promises to improve your life if you follow its regimen, buy its products or obey its leader. In Cultish, Amanda Montell peels back the linguistic layers of these groups and demonstrates that even mainstream brands and organizations use “cultish language” to draw people in.

Your father spent part of his childhood in a cult; more recently, your close friend joined Alcoholics Anonymous. How did these two loved ones’ stories prompt your interest in how cultish groups use language?

I grew up on my dad’s absolutely riveting tales of the four years he spent in a notorious socialist “utopia” in the Bay Area called Synanon, which started out as an alternative drug rehabilitation facility and later came to accommodate “lifestylers” who just wanted in on this unique communal way of living. (My dad joined in 1969, totally against his will, thanks to his communist absentee father, who was kind of a pseudo-intellectual hippie.)

To me, the most fascinating part of my dad’s stories was the special language they used in Synanon—buzzwords, slogans and terms that would sound utterly inscrutable to an outsider (like lifestylers, for example). The language was clearly meant to separate members from the outside world in a powerful psychological way.

Years later, in early 2018, I was talking to my best friend, who had just started going to AA, and I was equally bewildered by the sheer robustness of AA’s lexicon. AA is obviously a very different kind of “cult” than Synanon was, but that conversation with my friend prompted me to wonder: How exactly does cult language work to lure people into fanatical fringe groups? How does it make them stay?

Why do you think cults are a pop culture obsession at the moment? (The Girls by Emma Cline, Godshot by Chelsea Bieker, “The Path,” the “Escaping NXIVM” podcast, etc.)

In American culture now, much like in the 1960s and ’70s (another peak cult era), we’re experiencing a great deal of social tumult and mistrust of mainstream institutions such as government, religion and health care. So we’re looking to alternative sources to fill these voids.

At the same time, since the 1970s, dangerous cults (as well as relatively harmless “cult-followed” groups) have taken on a sort of perverse vintage cool factor. Fringe groups are spooky and fascinating, but they’re also very much afoot in our culture right now, so we find ourselves falling down these culty rabbit holes, unable to look away, almost like a car accident. We’re rubbernecking, scanning these stories to tell whether or not these groups are a threat to us. My argument in the book is that to some degree, we’re all under cultish influence. The proof is in how we speak every day.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Cultish.

How many cult survivors did you interview for this book? How did you find them? 

Oh gosh, dozens and dozens. Not all of them made it into the book, but the conversations were all enrapturing and invaluable. I met them all sorts of ways. Some I came across in documentaries or in articles, some I already knew or was connected to through friends, and some I just met at parties around Los Angeles (which I think says a lot about this town). You can’t go to a dinner party without running into some dreamer who was in Scientology or Kundalini yoga or at least some sort of pyramid scheme.

Why are phrases like brainwashing or mind control insufficient to describe how people get involved in cults? Were you surprised that the experts you interviewed said they don’t find those terms useful?

This was one of my first and favorite discoveries of the book. Popular media tends to explain how people end up in cults by talking about brainwashing, but I learned from cult scholars like Eileen Barker and Rebecca Moore that brainwashing is nothing but a metaphor (no one cuts open the brain and scrubs it clean) and a pseudoscientific concept (you can’t prove brainwashing doesn’t exist). In fact, using the word brainwash often does nothing but morally divide us: “You’re brainwashed!” “No, you’re brainwashed.” Once shots like these are fired, they choke the conversation, making it impossible to figure out what actually motivates people to become involved in cultish ideology, which is a much more interesting question and the one my book aims to answer.

You were previously a beauty editor at a women’s interest website and saw firsthand how the beauty, wellness and fitness industries use cult in marketing-speak (e.g., “a cult favorite”). What’s your take on that kind of usage? 

I actually don’t think it’s harmful or offensive to use cult as a sort of hyperbolic metaphor in a marketing context like this. Linguists have found that we as speakers and listeners are generally quite good at assessing the meaning and stakes implied whenever a familiar word is used in natural conversation. So when people liken a beauty brand to a cult, few listeners are going to become concerned that there’s a manic preacher making all these lipstick consumers engage in satanic rituals or something.

The only challenge with the word cult is that it’s become so broad, judgment-loaded, sensationalized and even romanticized, and is used in so many different contexts, that it really has no official or academic definition. In fact, many of the cult scholars I spoke to for the book don’t use the word formally, favoring more specific terms like new religions or alternative religions instead. The word cult has become kind of useless when describing groups that are actually dangerous, because it’s so unspecific. I think this haziness surrounding the word cult also says something about our culture’s extremely weird relationship with community, spirituality and identity.

“How exactly does cult language work to lure people into fanatical fringe groups? How does it make them stay?”

How is elitism—wanting to be part of the in crowd—exploited by cultish groups? 

Life as a human being is extremely confounding, and most of us spend a great deal of our time searching for satisfying answers to life’s biggest questions. When a guru or leader promises that they have the answers, and that you are special and smart enough to access them, that’s a really compelling message.

It’s a stereotype that cults or cultish groups prey on the weak and needy. But in fact, research shows that cults usually exploit people who are idealistic, optimistic and hardworking—people who don’t give up when things get tough. How can someone’s idealism, optimism and good intentions become the inroad to cultish groups?

Those are the types of people that cult recruiters actively go for. They don’t want people who are liable to break down quickly or get antsy and quit right away. Being an active member of a cult is hard work, so they want the best and brightest—people who hopefully have money to spare, are service-minded enough to give it to the group, and have enough optimism and perseverance to remain loyal even after things inevitably go sour. 

As a linguist, what is the difference between a religion and a cult? Did researching Cultish make the boundary between the two seem more or less blurry? 

A Jonestown survivor I interviewed for the book said something funny to me. He said, “A cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” It’s a pithy and humorous aphorism, and it totally rings true, but in terms of actual social science, instinctive judgments like that are not how one tells if a group is dangerously culty or not.

There’s another quote I included in the book, which I think is more logically sound. It comes from the religious studies community, and it goes, “Cult + time = religion.” Cultural normativity has so much to do with whether or not a spiritual group is considered a cult, even if its tenets and behaviors are no wackier or more dangerous than a better-established religion. After all, in Catholic Belgium, Quakers are considered a deviant cult, and Quakerism is just about the chillest religion around.

“A cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.”

The word gaslighting is used frequently online and in media. What does it really mean, and what does it have to do with cults?

Gaslighting is a term that derives from the 1938 British play Gas Light, which chronicles a husband’s attempts to drive his wife to madness in part by dimming the lights in their house and then denying that anything is different when she points out the change, causing her to doubt her own sanity. Today, gaslighting is used metaphorically to describe any situation in which someone tries to force another person to question their own completely valid, grounded reality as a means of gaining and maintaining control over them. It’s a tactic employed by not only toxic romantic partners (who are more or less leaders of their own minicults) but also cult leaders, who thrive on causing followers to mistrust their own thoughts and feelings so that they depend on the leader to tell them what they need to do to feel safe. In Cultish, I talk all about how to recognize gaslighting in language. (The section on Scientology is particularly disturbing. Those folks are the ultimate linguistic gaslighters.)

Multilevel marketing (MLM) and direct sales have a long and ignominious history of targeting women, especially stay-at-home moms. How have more recent MLMs such as LuLaRoe employed phrases like boss babe and entrepreneur to their benefit? 

MLMs have always preyed on folks locked out of the labor market, especially unemployed middle-class wives and mothers. Since the dawn of the modern direct sales industry, MLM recruitment materials have employed pseudo-female empowerment language as a way to “inspire” (read: deceive) potential “affiliates.”

In midcentury America, Tupperware promised to be the “best thing to happen to women since they got the vote.” Now, in the era of Lean In commodified feminism, these insidiously nimble companies use trendy, Pinterest-y #girlboss language as a way to convince women that they’re signing up to be the SHE-E-O of their own business, as opposed to just another cog in the predatory wheel of multilevel marketing.

What are some of the features of cultish language used by Q, the supposed leader of QAnon? What was it like writing and editing this book while QAnon rose to prominence? 

The language of QAnon has now spread far beyond the terms initially used by the group’s faceless “leader,” Q. QAnon has since melded with New Age wellness communities and anti-vax/anti-mask circles, so the language has several dialects, if you will. It’s basically a weird hybrid of conspiratorial speak (“deep state,” “liberal elite,” countless code words, acronyms and hashtags) and woo-woo talk of “vibrations” and “great awakenings.” And it’s always changing, in order to accommodate new QAnon offshoots and to outrun social media algorithms, which become trained to recognize QAnon language and disable the accounts using it.

It was interesting, to say the least, to write about QAnon as it was taking root and then exploding and evolving; it required a lot of last-minute updates. Actually, the final part of my book was about something entirely different before it became clear that QAnon was becoming a big deal. I’m saving the content that got cut for a rainy day.

“None of us is above cultish influence, not even me.”

Jeff Bezos is known to use vague aphorisms such as “think big,” “dive deep” and “have backbone” as Amazon Leadership Principles. Self-help bloggers on Instagram tend to embrace similarly vague “You can do it!” messages. What sets off your alarm bells when you read these types of so-called inspiring messages?

I think fauxspiration can be more sinister than it sounds. It’s the sort of language that triggers a strong emotional response in people, but it doesn’t actually mean anything specific, and cult leaders benefit from that vagueness. When their rhetoric is lofty and nebulous, ill-intentioned gurus can hide pernicious intentions or even change their fundamental ideology whenever it’s convenient, and meanwhile, people will just project whatever they want the language to mean onto it.

One example of how this can play out in a dangerous way is in the form of the fauxspirational quotegrams that the “Pastel QAnon” community uses. A Pastel QAnon person might post a millennial pink cursive post that says something like, “You have the power to raise your own vibration,” which may not sound like a culty message to outsiders (we “sheeple” can be so “blind”), but those who are already amenable to New Age-y conspiratorial thinking might interpret that to mean “You don’t need pharmaceuticals to heal your depression or the vaccine to protect you from COVID.”

Toward the conclusion of Cultish, you say that writing this book led you to have a “stronger sense of compassion” for people who get involved in cultish groups. Why is that?

Ironically, when talking about cults and cult followers, a lot of us do the same thing that people in cults are trained to do, which is to morally and intellectually separate ourselves from those people. We like to tell ourselves that folks who wind up in cultish groups, from NXIVM to QAnon, are naive, messed up idiots and that we would never get involved in a group “like that” because we’re too smart and virtuous.

But I’ve found that oftentimes the people who are the most judgmental of cult followers (which, again, is a subjective term) are people who are involved with pretty culty groups themselves—whether it’s a startup that puts the “cult” in company culture or some all-consuming online community. None of us is above cultish influence, not even me. And in general, I find that understanding the psychological motivations underlying people’s seemingly bizarre behaviors makes you feel calmer and more compassionate. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also empathy. And that’s ultimately what I hope my book does for people.

Amanda Montell peels back the linguistic layers of these groups and demonstrates that even mainstream brands and organizations use “cultish language” to draw people in.

James Tate Hill

Blind Man’s Bluff chronicles how James Tate Hill concealed the loss of his sight—and what he gained when he finally stopped hiding.
NonfictionAnimals

Mary Roach

Interview by Alice Cary

Wandering through Aspen, Colorado, at 3:30 a.m., Mary Roach turned into a dark alley and encountered a burly intruder: a full-grown black bear happily gorging himself on restaurant waste. Roach knew full well that the bear could be dangerous. She also knew that the bear shouldn’t grow accustomed to being close to humans because it could lead to bolder, more aggressive behavior in the future. Nonetheless, she pleaded with her companion from the National Wildlife Research Center, “Can we go just a little bit closer? Just a foot closer?”

As she chats by phone from her home in the Bay Area, Roach vividly recalls that impulse to forget everything she knew about responsible wildlife encounters. “None of that was in my head,” she says. “It was just, ‘I want to get closer.’ . . . People almost seem to have an inborn affinity for animals—particularly big, furry, kind of cute ones. People are drawn to them. They want to feed them. And there begins the problem.”

That Aspen garbage gangster is just one of a variety of furry fugitives Roach writes about in Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, her fascinating and often hilarious investigation into what happens when creatures commit crimes ranging from murder and manslaughter to robbery, jaywalking, home invasion and trespassing. Ever since her 2003 debut, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach has been taking readers on a series of surprising explorations—from space travel to the afterlife. Like Susan Orlean, Roach has a knack for taking a deep, deep dive into unexpected and sometimes even mundane subjects (the alimentary canal, for instance, in Gulp) and unearthing a narrative feast of freaky fun facts and captivating characters.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Fuzz.

Roach started honing her keen observation skills early, as an elementary school student in Norwich, Vermont, where she and a friend sometimes ventured out at night to peek into people’s windows. (Decades later, her mother was absolutely horrified when Roach fessed up to these outings.) “We weren’t Peeping Toms, obviously,” she says. “We weren’t looking for naked women or men. We just liked to look in.”

And that, Roach says, is the curiosity factor that sparks her writing. “My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”

She also mentions another childhood adventure that may have signaled an early predilection for wildlife research. She and her friend called it “The Potted Meat Project,” in which the two pals would hang or bury potted meat sandwiches in the woods in Etna, New Hampshire, “playing naturalists. Then we’d go and take notes and look for tracks,” Roach says. When they returned, the food was gone and there were some tracks, but “we didn’t follow up. We were in fifth or sixth grade, and we had the attention span of a gnat.”

“My motivating sentiment is ‘What’s going on in there? This is a world I don’t know. Maybe it’s interesting.’”

Writing Fuzz involved much more follow-through as Roach trekked with man-eating leopards in the Indian Himalayas, investigated gull vandals at the Vatican the night before Easter Mass and tracked mountain lions in California. Thankfully, she finished these travels before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. “It would have been a disaster,” she says, imagining what might have been. “Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds. That’s so much more interesting for my readers, and for me, honestly. I really love that part of what I do: the research, and the being there.”

Because of this commitment, Roach encountered intense, unforgettable new worlds as she researched Fuzz. In northern India, she came within 100 yards of a leopard wearing a radio collar—but, much to her disappointment, she never saw the animal, who was on the other side of a river. “I would’ve loved to be in the classic National Geographic scenario, surrounded by these creatures, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way,” she says. In another part of India, she armed herself with bananas because she wanted to know “what it was like to be mugged by monkeys,” which is a widespread problem in many areas. “I was nervous,” she admits. “They’re not large animals, but they can get aggressive. I was standing with a bag of like six bananas, so I was asking for it.” The monkeys were speedy snatchers, as it turned out, so they left Roach unscathed.

Reading one of Roach’s books is always a breezy, informative treat, but a lot of behind-the-scenes effort goes into their creation, given Roach’s trademark immersive approach. The creation of this book, especially, involved hurdles from the start. In fact, Roach initially contemplated covering a completely different topic: natural disasters and the science of rescue, first aid, prevention and preparation. Eventually, however, she realized that she wouldn’t be allowed to tag along with first responders during those crucial early moments of a disaster. 

“Yes, you can talk to scientists on Zoom, but that doesn’t work for me. I need something I can tag along for and see as it unfolds.”

After that, Roach turned her attention to tiger penises. (Yep, you read that right.) She’s fascinated by forensics, whether humans or animals are involved, and an expert taught her how to tell counterfeit tiger penises from real ones, which are valued in some cultures for their supposed powers of virility. “I can fill you in if you want to know,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve got all of these bizarre photographs of dried mammal genitalia on my phone.” However, once again, she couldn’t further develop this subject because she couldn’t legally visit crime scenes, which often involved poachers.

Roach then had a eureka moment: “What if we turned it around, and the animals were the perpetrators rather than the victims?” Before long she was in Reno, Nevada, attending a five-day training session for wildlife officers tasked with investigating animal attacks. (She refers to these professionals in chapter one of Fuzz as “maul cops.”) Roach was gloriously in her element, hearing tales of bears discovered in the back seat of a car eating popcorn and a cougar wrongfully accused of murder. (The murderer was actually a human, armed with an ice pick, who years later bragged about the crime.) During one training session, Roach and the other participants headed out to examine simulated crime scenes in the woods so they could guess what had happened. As with any crime scene, DNA is often key, but with animal attacks, clues are often contaminated by scavenger animals who arrive after a death. Roach relished such forensic details, jotting down remarks like, “Bears are more bite bite bite bite. . . . It’s a big mess.”

“You spend three or four days with those people, and you get the sense that, my God, animals are attacking everyone all the time,” Roach says. “But . . . it’s actually super rare. Animal attacks just tend to get so much media attention when they happen. It eclipses anything else happening in the news, even human murders.”

“Whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”

In addition to killer animals, Roach’s book includes one chapter on poisonous beans, as well as one on “danger trees”—falling trees or limbs that sometimes kill bystanders. When one such tree was being blown up for safety reasons in British Columbia, Canada, Roach got to be a “guest detonator.” “That was awesome,” she says. “I enjoy large explosions.”

With all of this deadly data, has writing Fuzz changed how Roach feels about outdoor adventures?

Roach explains that when she hikes in California, she sometimes sees signs warning of mountain lions and coyotes in the area. “My first reaction is that I’d love to encounter one,” she says. “I don’t have a fear of any of them. But at the same time, it saddens me, because whenever these animals are coming in contact with humans more frequently, it doesn’t go well for the animals.”

Science writer Mary Roach shares some highlights from her worldwide travels to collect stories of marauding monkeys, bandit bears and other fuzzy fugitives.

Sarah Ruhl

A playwright with an incredible eye for detail and a searing voice shares her own story of motherhood and facial paralysis.
NonfictionHumorEssays

Phoebe Robinson

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

In her third book, Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes, Phoebe Robinson is as hilarious, smart and honest as ever. She’s taking action, too, with a new publishing imprint called Tiny Reparations Books.

Congratulations on your latest accomplishments—jewels in your queenly crown!—including your third book in five years. Did you always want to be an author? What about it has been the most surprising, exciting or bizarre?
Thank you so much! I definitely didn’t always want to be an author, which is surprising considering how much I love books and how I used to write stories as a kid. I kind of dabbled in artistic things. Like, I used to draw a lot as a kid and was obsessed with movies and TV shows, so my dream was to write dramatic screenplays that would go on to win Oscars. Very different track that I’m on now—haha—but I’m so happy. I’m right where I’m supposed to be. 

What has been most surprising is seeing how much my writing improves book to book. It’s a great way to see what I’ve learned consciously and subconsciously being revealed through my work. Most exciting would have to be when I made the New York Times bestsellers list for You Can’t Touch My Hair. That was my first book, and a lot of effort went into spreading the word about YCTMH, so I’m glad we achieved that goal. And for most bizarre, it would have to be Oprah calling to congratulate me on YCTMH and telling me she enjoyed reading it. Would have never expected that to happen.

For this book, what essay came to you first? What was on your mind that made you feel like it was time to get to work on this collection? 
Definitely “Quaranbae.” It was early in quarantine, but I had already started noticing some things both bae and I did that made me laugh or go, “That’s interesting.” Just us being around each other all the time and the ways in which we got in each other’s ways. I just sort of chuckled and wrote a few things down in my Notes app, and then a title popped into my head: Diary of a Bitch in Quarantine. And I thought, “Huh. Maybe this could be a fun essay collection.” I texted my literary agent, Robert, and he said that was cool. So I just started working on a proposal. Then that boneheaded “I Take Responsibility” video came out, and so in addition to writing about personal things, I wanted to write about performative allyship and all that jazz. I truly wasn’t planning on writing a book during quarantine. I think I just needed a creative outlet because so much was unknown. And now we’re here!

“It’s my responsibility to shine a light on people and help make their paths a bit easier than mine has been.”

You do stand-up comedy, podcasts, hosting and acting in addition to writing books. Does one aspect of your multihyphenate career feel most dominant to you, or do you view all of your various jobs as elements of a larger creative whole?
Definitely the latter. I’m just curious about and interested in reflecting many sides of my creativity. And each one nourishes a part of me. I love doing stand-up and getting that immediate feedback from the audience of, “Yes, that is hilarious” or, “Naw, not there yet, but you’re on the right path, so figure it out.” Writing allows me to lean into the side of me that enjoys being alone, where I can be funny or serious. And then all the film and TV stuff is so collaborative, and I enjoy that process of trying to build something that would be impossible for one person to pull off. 

The latest additions to the Phoebeverse are a production company and a book imprint, both called Tiny Reparations. What does that name mean to you?
I used to always joke that I’m never going to get the reparations, like the cash, but I can get those small moments of payback from the universe, such as when I met Bono, the lead singer of U2, which is my all-time favorite band. With the production company and imprint, the meaning behind the name expanded from a joke to a reality. It’s been the running theme throughout my career. I’ve always used whatever platform to help uplift other voices and share the wealth. I don’t want to be the token. I don’t want to be the “exceptional one” in a sea of white people in entertainment and publishing. First of all, that is a fallacy. There’s not just one special person of color who is good at this stuff. A whole host of them are, and many of them are ignored, and I don’t want to be the person doing the ignoring. So it’s my responsibility to shine a light on people and help make their paths a bit easier than mine has been. It’s been a wonderful privilege, and I’m always looking for ways to do more. Stay tuned!

“There’s a lot of work to be done to make this industry more inclusive, and I believe we can get there.”

What do you most want to accomplish with Tiny Reparations Books, in terms of its potential to create change in the publishing business?
Without a shadow of a doubt, my goal is to have one of my authors’ books land in the top three on the New York Times bestseller list. Coincidentally, every writer on the slate is a debut author, which is so freaking dope, so it would be nice to be on that journey with them and celebrate them bursting onto the scene in such a cool way. But more importantly, I just want every author to feel supported and like they absolutely got to write the book they wanted to. Writing can be such a torturous and stressful process, and worrying about the book doing well and building a presence on social media can make someone be in their head. I want them to find joy in the process because you never forget the whole journey your first book goes through.

I also really want TRB to help shake things up. To be one of many imprints that are changing the landscape of publishing, both with the kinds of books being published as well as the kinds of people behind the scenes who are gatekeepers, all the way down to interns. There’s a lot of work to be done to make this industry more inclusive, and I believe we can get there. Everyone just has to show up and contribute. It’s not going to magically change overnight because Roxane Gay and I have imprints. The onus shouldn’t be on the two of us to fix everything, ya know?

Will you share a bit with us about the books you’ll be publishing first? 
Yes! I can give you a sneak peek of a couple of them. First up is What the Fireflies Knew. When I read the title to myself, I just imagine Oprah saying it while holding the book and standing in her kale garden. It’s written by Kai Harris, and it’s a coming-of-age story about a preteen girl named KB and her sister who stay with their grandfather for the summer after their father passes away. It’s really moving and powerful and perfectly captures the innocence of youth, sibling relationships and trying to find your place in a world that you don’t quite understand. I love it so much, and I truly believe other people will as well. Kai is the truth!

Then there is Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, who legit wrote this book while in medical school. When I learned that, I was like, “Lol, wut?! I will never complain about writing a book again.” It’s a great heist novel about a group of 20-something Chinese peeps who get hired to steal Chinese artifacts from Western museums. I mean, talk about a hook. Beyond the plot-driven pace, it really sucks you in because there’s so much in there about family and identity and the assumptions we make about what we do and don’t mean to the important people in our lives. I gobbled this up in two days. Grace has a very bright future as an author, and I’m happy she’s on #TeamTinyRepBooks.

You write so movingly about what life was like for you during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as an individual, as a partner to your significant other (affectionately known as your British Baekoff) and as a Black woman. You write, “If I can make you laugh and forget your problems for a moment then I did something.” Who or what did that for you during 2020?
Great quesh! Tbh, 2020 is kind of a blur. One day just sort of bled into the next, but I will say that I rewatched “Sex and the City,” and that was great. It is such a formative show for me, and Samantha Jones is so freaking funny. It was great to revisit the show and forget the state of the naysh for a bit.

“In my opinion, it’s my best book yet.”

It’s fascinating to read about how your parents have influenced you, whether you find yourself aligning with them (like in your desire to help and support people through your work) or doing things they won’t (like traveling). What was it like for you, plumbing your relationship with them? What was their reaction to the book?
I always enjoy writing about them because they are so different from me and funny in their own unique ways. They haven’t read the book yet. I didn’t want to give them an Advanced Reader Copy just because I didn’t want them to read the book when it wasn’t perfect. But they adorably preordered the book, so I’m sure I will hear soon how they feel about it. I think they will dig it. In my opinion, it’s my best book yet.

You got your passport in 2015 and have been broadening your horizons ever since, as per your “Black Girl, Will Travel” essay. What do you think is a good destination for a travel newbie? Where are you going to travel next?
I’m probably biased because my boyfriend is from the U.K., but I always tell people that London is great to visit. It’s similar to New York in a lot of ways, but also wildly different. There’s so much to do and lots of good food options, and because you can do a daytrip to Bath or take a train to Paris, it’s a place you can return to often and still discover new things. 

I miss travel so much! I really want to go to Spain. That’s been on my list for several years, and I just couldn’t make it work. So I’m going to get my shit together and just do it once it’s truly safe to be traveling internationally. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes.

In the hilarious titular essay, you note with indignation that, despite everyone proclaiming undying love for Mr. Rogers, most of them have missed the memo about the value of having separate outside and inside clothes. This prompted you to share “Phoebe-isms,” about which you feel Very Strongly. Are there any that didn’t make it into the book that you feel compelled to share now?
Surprisingly, I got everything off my chest. But I guess, I will say, “Wash your fucking legs!” When people on social media were talking about how they don’t wash their legs because the soap just drips down anyway in the shower, I almost vomited. That is nasty as hell. The shower isn’t a place to be taking shortcuts or phoning it in.

Once they’ve finished reading your book, where can your fans find you next—from on a stage, to on their bookshelves, to in their earbuds, to on their screens?
My HBO Max stand-up special will be premiering later this year, so be on the lookout for that and stream it! I wanna make a good impresh with the HBO Max folks, so I can do another special with them!

 

Author photo credit: Yavez Anthonio

Famously funny author, comedian and actor Phoebe Robinson adds “publisher” to her multihyphenate career.

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