MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
You might not know the name Mara Brock Akil, but you probably know her work. She's the writer and/or creator of "Girlfriends," "The Game," "Being Mary Jane" and recently the Netflix hit "Forever," based on the Judy Blume novel. In fact, she's the only African American showrunner to have a major television series during every year of the 2000s. But a novel of her own was missing from her decades-long career until now. "The Revelation Of Dionne Daphne" is Brock Akil's debut novel. And a heads-up - sexual abuse comes up.
Mara Brock Akil, thank you so much for joining us.
MARA BROCK AKIL: I am so happy to be here. Thank you. This is very exciting.
MARTIN: So given your body of work, I really found it hard to believe that this is your first novel.
BROCK AKIL: (Laughter).
MARTIN: Why a novel? Why now? Why this particular form of storytelling at this point in your career?
BROCK AKIL: The interiority. The needing more canvas. The ability to dig deeper in the depth and the layers of the portraits I like to paint of human beings, more specifically, Black women. You know, you hear things like, I don't know how they do it or what they're doing. Well, imagine also they're doing even more than what you think they are.
And why now to write a book is getting into how much we hide. And a lot of it is shame-based, and we're just bandaging ourselves together to get through the next day, to get through the next day. And I just thought, wouldn't it be great to sort of share a story about a woman that a lot of people on the street would admire just by her style, her presence? You know, this idea of having it together - a lot of us really are just sort of, like, barely there.
MARTIN: Could you give the broad outlines of the plot?
BROCK AKIL: This is Dionne Daphne, and it's early '90s in New York, and she's fly. She's got it going on. She's got money in her pocket.
MARTIN: Got a great job at Essence in its heyday, working in the - sort of the style...
BROCK AKIL: Yes.
MARTIN: ...And fashion space, and Essence magazine being...
BROCK AKIL: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Maybe a little different today. I mean, people might know it more for Essence Fest today, but just - in its heyday, was kind of the destination for Black women wanting to know what's going on in the world...
BROCK AKIL: Yes.
MARTIN: ...And in style and in fashion and really everything.
BROCK AKIL: In our politics and what were going on...
MARTIN: Politics. Everything.
BROCK AKIL: ...Our own - yeah, really seeing us. And so she's a part of that ecosystem. And here, she had a really great guy and thought it was - going to get married. And he knocks on the door one night, and he's not there to propose. He's actually there to give her life-changing news. And the book then takes place with her having to look back at the storms that she's been trying to outrun, and it's time. She has to face them. She has no choice but to face them with this news.
MARTIN: In a way, it's almost like she's living two lives. She's living her interior life with all the trauma, and then there's the exterior life. So why the 1990s?
BROCK AKIL: Well, at the time, too, the interior life - you can put it on hold. People can compartmentalize. But I think a lot of us do that. We're riding two bicycles all the time, the exterior and the interior versions of our lives. And the '90s, it was just a really wonderful time. I think that group of early career women in the '90s were really the first generation of acting out the dreams of their mothers and their grandmothers and that we were actually able to take up territory in a lot of career spaces that were forbidden for them. And then how much we really needed each other because technology did not permeate our lives the way it does today.
MARTIN: Well, it's interesting because the HIV epidemic is also a storyline in the book. It was a time when a lot of people were kind of exploring their identity and their desires. But then there was this shadow that then...
BROCK AKIL: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Started to loom over it, right?
BROCK AKIL: Absolutely. You know, a lot of older generations like to talk about the younger generations and what they're not doing. But let me tell you what they are doing. They have been naming things to try to understand things. They're ready to have a deeper conversation. The naming of things allows us to kind of look deeper. And so the book allows me to join a conversation in a way that allows us to explore it in many different ways, through many different characters, about how a character can be knocked off their feet and get back up and get back up better than where we met her.
MARTIN: This book read in a way to me as an invitation to talk about difficult things with people you love.
BROCK AKIL: Yes. Thank you.
MARTIN: And I wondered whether, in part, your goal with this was to say, this is something that you could offer to people to help them open the door to a conversation that they may not have been able to have.
BROCK AKIL: Absolutely. That's what a lot of my work has been about. Hey, let's talk about it to the place of - Step 1 might just be to talk about it. And then I think we can go all the way to, what are the solutions we could do to stop this kind of behavior? If we understand what's happening, how do we stop some of these things? - or how to repair these things. But it is an invitation to talk.
MARTIN: To that end, though, I did find myself wondering - you give some hints in the book that you are yourself a survivor. And also, in subsequent interviews, you've been more clear...
BROCK AKIL: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...About the fact that you are a survivor yourself.
BROCK AKIL: Yes.
MARTIN: But it did make me wonder, having read that, how you were able to get through the writing of some of those sequences where you describe exactly what happened to you. And I found myself worrying about you.
BROCK AKIL: Oh, thank you.
MARTIN: Like, are you OK?
BROCK AKIL: Oh, I'm amazing. I really am OK. I'm not going to act like it was easy. It wasn't. But it was cathartic. It was cathartic to sit in the room because I'm here. I am here to look at it and say, you didn't take me down. I'm here. And I'm really proud to put the pain on the page in a way that people can't just skip over the words sexually abused or abused. That's on the page to understand what it is like for a young girl who later moves past it as a young woman and how it still shows up in her life. And how does trauma follow you in a way that you think you're over it, that the monster isn't there anymore, but it's still there in our behavior?
MARTIN: Well, how do you feel now that you've told this story?
BROCK AKIL: I feel - you know, it's funny. I'm a veteran in my career in television and film, and I'm a debut novelist now. And I really feel like I have a lot of energy back. I have so many more stories in me. And I just - I feel like, you know, Hamilton. I feel like I'm running out of time. I got so many stories to write, and I'm excited about it.
MARTIN: Mara Brock Akil is the author of the new novel "The Revelation Of Dionne Daphne." Mara Brock Akil, thank you so much for talking with us.
BROCK AKIL: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this.
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