Summer Books 2019
7/26/19 - We're staying cool reading plays, essays, sci-fi, and YA. Amina talks with Keah Brown about her essay collection, The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me. Gina chats with Aminah Mae Safi about her Gilmore Girls-inspired lesbian teen romance, Tell Me How You Really Feel. Tell us what you're reading by tagging #CYGbooks.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
Episode image by Marco Nurnberger
LINKS
Amina is reading: The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown
Ann is reading: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Gina is reading: Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi
Aminah Mae is reading:
Hot Dog Girl by Jennifer Dugan
Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
Follow our guests from this episode:
TRANSCRIPT: SUMMER BOOKS 2019
[Ads]
(0:29)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: On this week's agenda we're talking about books. I talk to Keah Brown about her book The Pretty One and Gina has an interview with Aminah Mae Safi about her novel Tell Me How You Really Feel.
[Theme Song]
(1:12)
Ann: Hey, hey, so you may have already heard or seen but we are going on tour this fall, heading to a handful of cities where we've never done a live show before and we are so excited to see all of you IRL. It's our Stay Hydrated Tour 2019. You can find us in late September and early October in Toronto, Detroit, Denver, Austin, and Houston. Get your tickets and get the full tour schedule at callyourgirlfriend.com/tour and if you are not in one of these cities we're sad to miss you but please give your local besties the heads-up that they should come hang out with us. We always have a great time and we can't wait to meet them too. Callyourgirlfriend.com/tour.
Gina: One more quick announcement before we start the show, we're getting ready to do an episode all about money, finances, your worries about money, your questions about money. What do you wish that you had learned about how to manage money earlier in your life? What are things that you're trying to figure out now? How is money affecting your relationships? Are you dealing with debt? Do you have extra money you're looking to invest? Let us know what you want to know. Leave us a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can also record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Please let us know in your voicemail or email whether it's okay to use your name on the show. Thanks!
(2:40)
Aminatou: It's summer books time, y'all!
Ann: Wait, reading them? Writing them?
Aminatou: Uh, I have never written anything in my life so I don't know what you're talking about but we are definitely reading summer books.
Aminatou: What are you reading this summer? What is on your like bedside stack/in your beach bag?
Aminatou: This summer I am reading some plays.
Ann: Ooh.
Aminatou: And, uh, also trying to get into some science fiction. Getting weird over here.
Ann: Oh my god, I am also -- I'm having an Octavia Butler summer. Did we do this unintentionally?
Aminatou: We did do it unintentionally. My god, the friendship, it is sustained by these moments. I love it.
Ann: Ugh, well I am dystopia deep in Parable of the Sower right now so . . . [Laughs]
Aminatou: I will report back.
Ann: The best.
[Interview Starts]
Keah: My name is Keah Brown. I'm a journalist and writer and the name of my book is The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Me.
Aminatou: Keah, I'm so excited that you're on Call Your Girlfriend. This is really fun for me.
Keah: I'm so excited to be on Call Your Girlfriend! I am such a fan as you know because I'm always tweeting you like "Hey girl!" [Laughs]
(4:00)
Aminatou: Well listen, we are fans too. I have been following you for so long. I love that this essay collection is out because your full personality gets to shine. I will be really honest, I do not have anybody -- until recently didn't have anybody very close to me who had a disability that they were very vocal about. It was very interesting that my entry and a lot of my consciousness in starting to think about these issues was through social media and through talking to people who have now become friends. And so I think that, you know, thinking of your book as a resource for people like me and for people who generally do not have a consciousness around disability is something that it makes me really excited because I'm like wow, we're such idiots and we need it.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: You know, but at the same time really realizing that my experience is not the experience that should be centered in talking about a book like this.
Ann: Yeah. I mean I think for a lot of people who will come across my book hopefully I'll maybe be the first person that they're reading about who is both physically and invisibly disabled. And so I don't mind being that starting point for someone else. I even say in the book like I may be the first black disabled woman whose book you're reading but I won't be the last because I know that there are so many people, you know, behind me who are ready to tell their own stories. And so I think if I'm the entry point that's fantastic. And I have so many stories to tell and I think that people will hopefully, you know, see that and understand that they need to change their cultural ideas of what it means to be disabled and what kind of lives we can lead as human beings first and open them up to this better world where we see more representation for all of us, not just for those of us who are able-bodied all the time without chronic illness.
(6:00)
Aminatou: Yeah, you know, and I think that that's what actually was so striking to me about reading your work is while you talk about your disability it's the lens through which you see the world but it's also not the totality of who you are.
Keah: Yes.
Aminatou: And when you took on this writing project you had the idea of making a book. Like how was that something that you negotiated for yourself?
Keah: Well, I mean I've always -- as a writer I've always wanted to write books. That's kind of been the dream. You know, I've been writing since I was like a young girl. First there was bad poems and then bad songs.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Keah: That seemed brilliant at the time. I was just like oh, these are fantastic. Like, you know, I'm just going to go to Nashville and somebody's just going to be like "I want her to be a songwriter" because Lord knows I can't sing. But I mean I've always been a writer who has wanted to write a book and initially I was desperate to write fiction first because fiction is kind of my first love. But I think as I sat down and talked with my agent Alex Slater of Trident Media Group, shout-out to him, I was like I think I want to do an essay collection first because I feel like it'll be a good introduction into who I am and kind of expand people's minds.
But I think writing a book is a really isolating process. And so you're kind of writing it very much by yourself with your thoughts having to contend with who you were and your past self. And so when you're doing that you have to open up old wounds, and I think just getting through that process, how I did it was just being like okay, this could help one person. Even if it helps one person or teaches someone something then it's worth it.
Aminatou: I love that. The Pretty One is a collection of essays that really explores your relationship with your twin sister. I'm always obsessed with sister narratives, but then twin sisters, I can't even -- like I cannot even handle that. [Laughs]
Keah: [Laughs]
(7:54)
Aminatou: You know, I was like wow, can you get -- like you are that close.
Keah: Yeah.
Aminatou: But I really love that you talk really candidly about your relationship with her and your relationship to her and the relationship that the world has around the two of you.
Keah: Yeah. I think it was imperative for me. I think that one was the one that I -- the essay that I was scaredest to write because I was like I need to be honest and so I don't want people to think this is like a me versus her thing. I want people to understand that I put Leah through so much. [Laughs] And I think it was just because I was uncomfortable with myself. And so when people usually see twin narratives it's like twins finishing each other's sentences, looking just alike, and, you know, doing all these things. And it's like because we never -- I don't look just like her and I think I was jealous of the twin narratives that I so desperately wanted and also thought were the only things that made twins twins.
So I talk about in the book, you know, Mary Kate and Ashley and Tia and Tamera Mowry and I'm like I want that but I knew at a very young age we wouldn't have that because we don't look exactly alike. And even now, you know, even though I've been working and we've been working on our relationship I think that's still a point of sadness for me that I don't look more like her so I get very insecure about that. But I think that for me to tell my full story I had to be honest about our particular relationship.
Aminatou: You know, Keah, the overwhelming feeling that I had when I was done -- like while I was reading your book and when I put it down was an overwhelming reminder of all the places, the areas in my life where I lack self-love and really thinking about how you have written an inspirational rallying cry to doing that. And so I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you are feeling about the ways that other people are receiving your work.
(9:55)
Keah: I think self-love is an every day process and so even now for me with the book done and written and out there in the world I think I have to work so hard at loving myself and I don't want people to ever feel the way I once did. I want people to understand that there's another side to it; you just have to work to get there and then keep working once you're there. It's like a job.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Keah: You get the brand new cushy job and you're like I have to do work now to stay here. So I think for me I wanted people to feel like it was possible for them too by the time they finish the book. I wanted people to feel like, you know, if she can do it and she can get to the other side of her own beating herself up and being mean to herself and hurting herself and hurting others in the process then maybe I can too.
And so I think, yeah, that was very important for me to show people that they can love themselves and that they should just the way they are and not make it so that they have to change who they are to receive love.
Aminatou: Right. Like just this idea that you are worthy of being loved right now. Like it's not a -- you know, they're not improvements that you need to make.
Keah: Right.
Aminatou: It sounds so simple but for me I was like oh! Like this is, you know, like I'm not saying I'm an emotionally sophisticated thinker because far from it. In fact I am the dumbest emotional thinker. But just seeing it spelled out there was something so powerful about that for me.
Keah: Yeah, me too. I think even in writing it I was just like epiphany after epiphany. Like oh, okay. You know, I have to like practice what I preach. I can't in one breath be like "Oh my god" to my friends, like "You're perfect. Who wouldn't love you?" and then turn that around to be like oh, this isn't the same thing for me. I have to give myself -- or at least try to give myself the love I give to others.
Aminatou: Wow.
(11:55)
Keah: And it seems -- right, it seems so simple but some days it's hard. [Laughs]
Aminatou: I mean . . .
Keah: Most days it's hard.
Aminatou: I would say most days it's very -- it's very, very, very hard. But, you know, at the same time it's just that thing that -- it's just also, you're so right, it makes you realize how much you can become a vessel for pouring into other people. And I think that for me a lot of that is tied into my blackness also.
Keah: Yes!
Aminatou: I will say being a black woman I find myself being this vessel for other people in a way that I have a real inability to do for myself.
Keah: Yep, same.
Aminatou: And just, you know, really interrogating that and sitting with that and realizing that the root cause of a lot of that is pain and it's the kind of pain you don't talk about a lot.
Keah: Right, it's not. And I think too for me a lot of it is like sometimes I feel like I give so much of myself to other people in that way because I don't want to give people a reason to leave.
Aminatou: Hmm.
Keah: And I think that's something I'm trying to, you know, investigate and figure out myself is just like at the core of it it's like I do it because I love people but also because I don't want to be abandoned by them.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Keah: So, you know, it's a mixed bag.
Aminatou: I mean investigating your own feelings, is there anything more dangerous? [Laughs]
Keah: It is literally the worst but people have to do it.
Aminatou: Well, you know, the tagline of your book which I love is On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love With Her. I love that it's just like it's the most charming invitation into just being like okay, this girl is cute. She is cool. We are falling in love with her. And I just wonder if you can talk more about the process of just like saying that very boldly and openly.
Keah: Oh girl, I'm trying to get -- I'm trying to be booed up so I was like listen.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(13:55)
Keah: I was like listen, if this tagline can help me get a date I am all for it. Because I think my editor was like "You know, it should be funny but not too try hard. It should grab people's attention." And I was like "Oh, don't worry. I got it. I got it. I got it."
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Keah: So he was like "Oh no, we love this! This is perfect." Rakesh Satyal at Atria Books, he was amazing and he was like "Oh no, this is great." And I was like I'm really just trying to be out here, you know, to get a date.
Aminatou: Right. You're like this book is my resume. It's my emotional resume and it's my professional resume so I need everybody to read every part of it.
Keah: Right. Everything is -- exactly. I was like everything is here. You know, you get a taste of what I love in pop culture. Like if you're down to watch TV with me, it would be perfect. I gave everybody, you know, the rundown so that they would know. If they wanted to go on a date they had everything they needed to know to impress me.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Oh man, and you look so beautiful on the cover! Like that sweater is so bomb.
Keah: Thank you so much.
Aminatou: Now that I know it's like a -- it's a dating photo profile, [Laughs] it's your billboard for that, I was like this is genius. You always look cute.
Keah: Thank you.
Aminatou: True to the hashtag you started also, right? About this.
Keah: Yes. Yes, #DisabledAndCute. I started it in 2017 as well and essentially it was kind of a very me-centric thing where I was like I want to celebrate finally feeling good in my body. And then, you know, other people joined in and it went viral then we went global and it was just this really cool place for disabled people to feel good about themselves and kind of give themselves permission to love who they are and who they can be and who they will be. So yeah, for me I think it's always been about trying to find other ways to make people feel as good as I do now. And so hopefully the hashtag and the book is an extension of that.
(16:00)
Aminatou: Yeah. You've also been doing some profiles lately, some celebrity profiles I have to say.
Keah: Slight work. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Slight work. You're getting like a diversity of assignments. Your work has a larger audience. And at the same time you put all of this blood, sweat and tears into the book.
Keah: Yeah.
Aminatou: And so I'm really wondering, you know, from a writing mogul standpoint since that's where you seem to be headed . ..
Keah: [Laughs] I'll take it.
Aminatou: You know, how you are really thinking about the things that you want to write and the niche that you want to carve for yourself.
Keah: Well for me it's like I don't want to be pigeonholed. I think we talked about it earlier but for me I wanted to talk about in the book specifically that, you know, I am disabled and it's worthy of talking about but that's not all that I am. And as a pop culture lover and a person who used to write exclusively for a magazine called Cliché Magazine where I talked to celebrities about TV shows and movies I wanted people to realize that I can do that too. Not everything I have to write should be through the lens of disability.
So the profile that I did on Brie Larson for Captain Marvel and the March cover of Marie Claire UK, when she reached out for me to do the cover I was like ecstatic because I think people don't often give, you know, marginalized writers a chance to write outside their beat. And for me that was really important because I think a lot of times people only think I can write about, you know, the trauma of disability and the trauma of being a black woman. And Brie Larson was like "No girl, I got you. [Laughs] Like I want my press days to be more diverse and inclusive." And she kind of gave me the opportunity of a lifetime in that I was able to do this profile of one of the biggest movies of the year, and so she gave me this opportunity to kind of show what I can do and spread my wings even further. And that has led to other big opportunities. So I'm very grateful to her and her team for it.
(18:12)
Doing that and writing the book was a really big and welcome exploration into other things that I love like pop culture and music and love and all these things that I've never really had the chance to write about in full before. I was like well this is my book so I'm going to write what I want and hopefully people will gravitate towards that and give me other opportunities in the future to do something outside of just talking about, you know, identity. Even though that work is also very important to me.
Aminatou: I really love that she -- that Brie Larson and her team reached out to you because it's such an example of how powerful people can leverage their power to get what they want and to do something better in the world.
Keah: Right.
Aminatou: So that makes me really happy. I might actually watch Captain Marvel now. [Laughs]
Keah: So good.
Aminatou: Okay, if you say so. It's been on my to watch list but writing this book has not been conducive to watching movies so . . .
Keah: Right. Oh no, it's so time-consuming. Oh I wish you guys so much luck. Oh my goodness, it's so time-consuming.
Aminatou: We'll take it. We'll take the luck. Is there -- now that a lot of people are reading it and reviewing it, is there an essay that is resonating the most with people?
Keah: A lot of people like the ponytail essay.
Aminatou: Without too many spoilers explain to the listeners the ponytail essay.
Keah: Okay, so the ponytail episode is called Freedom of a Ponytail and is essentially . . .
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(19:45)
Keah: [Laughs] And it's essentially about me being 24 and learning to put my hair up in a ponytail by myself for the first time which sounds like a very simple thing but when you grow up in a disabled body I just never knew how to do it and so it took a lot of weeks of practice, of putting my own hair in my hands and like tying around. So people really love -- like tying it around my hair and then making a ponytail. So people really love that one.
They like the chairs essay which is essentially just me talking about how much I love chairs and kind of giving them personality traits and names and treating them like they're my romantic relationships because I spend so much time with chairs. So people love those two the most I think.
Aminatou: Aww, I love that. Those are two of my favorites too.
Keah: Good. I like those ones too. I'm biased, I like them all, but I really like those two.
Aminatou: Right. It's like somebody who's like "Can you tell us who your favorite child in your essay collection is please?"
Keah: Right.
Aminatou: Like we would never do that. Keah, where can our listeners find your work?
Keah: You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Keah_Maria. I'm also on Facebook at The Keah Brown so you can find me there. I post a bunch of my work but also I don't take myself too seriously so there's other stuff about cheesecake and attractive people and good books and TV shows that make me both happy and super angry so you'll get the gamut of me.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Keah: You'll get everything all at once in those places.
Aminatou: Oh man, Keah, you are the best!
Keah: Thank you girl.
Aminatou: I just think I'm really glad that you have -- you know, that you have a book out there that is going to make people fall in love with you and also hopefully fall back a little bit.
Keah: Fingers crossed.
Aminatou: Fall back a little bit in love with ourselves.
Keah: Thank you, you too. Thank you so much. This conversation was amazing.
[Interview Ends]
[Ads]
(25:20)
[Interview Starts]
Aminah: I'm Aminah Mae Safi and my book that's out now is Tell Me How You Really Feel.
Gina: Thanks for being on Call Your Girlfriend, Aminah.
Aminah: Thank you so much Gina for having me.
Gina: Thanks for being another iconic Aminah to join the show.
Aminah: Oh, you know, I have a lot to live up to. [Laughs] It's a lot.
Gina: I mean we all have a lot to live up to in this novel. We're going to talk about some of the wonderful literary qualities in your book, but first you dedicate it to the creator of Gilmore Girls.
Aminah: I did, yeah.
Gina: Amy Sherman-Palladino.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: What do Rory and Paris have to do with these decidedly not-white, not-Connecticut protagonists?
Aminah: [Laughs]
Gina: Tell me how you really feel.
(26:00)
Aminah: So I feel like the Rory/Paris ship is super iconic.
Gina: And when you say ship?
Aminah: Basically the non-canonical relationship that they have a romantic future together.
Gina: How fans would read the show.
Aminah: How fans would read the show. I think that their chemistry is really great on the show. In fact Liza Weil, is that how you say her name, who plays Paris was actually only scripted to be on three episodes and her chemistry with Rory was so good they just kept bringing Paris back which I think is super fun. So it's just honoring that two ambitious girls who actually are the best and most compatible relationship in the show. Rory has all these kind of terrible boyfriends throughout all of Gilmore Girls. It's like they seem like they could be okay then they get in the relationship and they're actually awful to her. It's like pretty much -- and it's TV, right? TV does that where it's trying to make it interesting.
Gina: Well, so what made you want to kind of take that dynamic and blow it up into a novel?
Aminah: I love their dynamic because they are -- well in the show they're enemies-to-friends but I always think of it as enemies-to-lovers. And I love enemies-to-lovers because it's two people that have to kind of fight and find their way through understanding one another. They come from different perspectives. They come from different ways of understanding each other and I think that I've seen a lot of that just in my life. My parents are really different. My grandparents were both -- like both of them were really different, both sets of them. So I think I just had a lot of that modeled on top of the fact that it's just a very fun trope that I love to play with and I love to play around with. I just love the idea of getting to have two young, ambitious women of color who have two really different ambitions. Rachel wants to be a filmmaker; Sana wants to be a surgeon. Like I wanted them to have both the creative ambition and a more technical STEM ambition and watch sparks fly. I think it's really fun.
(27:55)
Gina: Yeah, tell us a little bit more about Sana and Rachel. Like you were saying they're both young women of color. They go to the same school. You dig so deeply into the particularity of each of their identities and their different personalities. Even their different LA neighborhoods.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: How did you go about figuring out who each of them was?
Aminah: I love character. I think I always write in a place of character. But I start with archetypes actually, like I wanted the idea of like enemies-to-lovers and I loved Paris and Rory because they're both so ambitious and they just really push each other and I love that. And then I wanted it to be a jock and a nerd but the nerd is a film buff and the jock is a cheerleader. And that's the fun part about getting to write two young women falling in love is you just get to play with gender on a level that you don't in a straight romance and you get to dive into the performance of gender and the ways in which it's actually just super wacky and doesn't make sense and you get to not just flip it on its head but like use it as its own vehicle for that character. It's also the whole story's a love letter to LA so it was fun to dig into like well where does Sana live? Where does Rachel live? How does that shape who they are? How does that shape -- because neighborhoods shape who you are in this city in a way that I feel like maybe New Yorkers kind of understand but it's like you have this kind of locus point of where you're from in Los Angeles and then you radiate out from there and it feels like a piece of you.
Gina: Yeah. There are not so many stories set in LA that feel like the place where I grew up and have spent most of my life and your book really did.
Aminah: Oh thanks.
Gina: What made you want to write specifically about the often unseen or unsexy jobs in the film industry?
Aminah: I think those are my favorite jobs, and I think I've known a lot of people who've worked as editors or who have worked editing like commercial business films or people who were on crews and held the lights or plugged in the electricity. Like there's so many people in this city that have those jobs. I wanted Sana's mom to have -- for her to have that kind of job because it felt like a viable blue collar job that she could've had and worked her way up the rungs if she had worked hard and gotten lucky and it felt like a fun way to honor the film industry on one end where you have a girl who wants to be a director and on the other you have a girl whose mom really worked up the masculine, blue collar rungs of the film industry which is not easy.
And it was a fun thing to give her mom and to kind of dig into what that means, because I think with film we always think about the glitz and the glamour and the Hollywood and the parties and all those visible parts of the film industry. I think people don't understand how many invisible jobs there are like all the people that just do craft catering for films. Like that's a whole segment of jobs that people have that people don't think about but they're essential to getting a film going because you have to feed your crew and you have to feed your cast. You can't do 12 hour days without food on the table, and it's just this wild thing that I don't think people think about what it takes to like -- you're basically running a mini army essentially to get a movie made which is fun.
(31:13)
Gina: And you exploit that in the story too as Rachel is trying to figure out what it means to become a director.
Aminah: Yeah, and like what it means to share that vision. When we talk about women running a set we often want to describe this nurturing, female-only space and I think that that works with some women and I didn't think that would work with nature and I wanted her to find this space that was her own of finding leadership that was neither coded feminine nor coded masculine and neither trying to aggressively control people nor just only nurturing them into behaving but instead finding this way of sharing her vision and getting people to see what she's going for in a film and help her make that. And I feel like that was also part of her struggle as a character is to let people into the way she sees the world. She kind of lets everything out and lashes but she doesn't let people in and let them see the world from her perspective essentially.
(32:10)
Gina: Totally. We've talked about how Sana and Rachel go from enemies to lovers, so people already know that, and they would know that just from picking up the cover of your book.
Aminah: Yeah, the cover's a big spoiler. [Laughs]
Gina: I did find myself extremely pissed off about how much pain they cause each other early on so good job. You wrote that really well.
Aminah: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Gina: Are you someone that's fueled by competition?
Aminah: Yeah, I am. I think -- and especially as a teenager it was very much if you told me I couldn't do something I had to go immediately do the thing. Like if . . . and just still, but especially as a kid it was very like "Oh, girls can't do that." I was like "I'm going to go do it right now." Right? Like it was -- I have two cats but it's that cat thing where you're like "You can't do that." And then they just knock the thing over. That definitely -- that definitely comes from me. [Laughs]
Gina: When do you think that competitive energy like in the Rory/Paris dynamic, when does it energize relationships between women versus this idea that we're needlessly tearing each other down? Like I think that there's a hard finding that in-between space that isn't like "Oh my god, we should all be nice to each other."
Aminah: Yeah. I think that -- okay, so I love old '80s romcoms and I'm actually going to reference one right now. In Say Anything you know there part where Diane Court goes to the party with Lloyd Dobler?
Gina: This is Ione Skye's character with John Cussack.
Aminah: Yes, John Cussack.
Gina: Yeah.
Aminah: So she goes to a party with him and she runs into her like salutatorian nemesis and that girl is just like "Thank you so much for being so good because without you I wouldn't have pushed myself." And I love when women push each other in that way, when they want to model the women that they see succeeding. I think it does tap into what Ann and Aminatou talk about with Shine Theory but I think it's also just healthy competition. I don't think we get to see healthy competition between women a lot, especially young women, where it's like it's okay to compete with another woman, just don't tear her down. It's okay to see her and be like I want to do as well or better than her, or her doing well doesn't mean that I can't do well. It's just when you use that as a way to tear down or when you use that as a way to say there's only one seat at the table and it's going to be me. Your competitor is someone you respect and it doesn't always have to be someone you like but they can drive you to be better.
But that's also why I love enemies-to-lovers because I love two people that push each other to be the best versions of themselves. Like that's my favorite part about love is this idea that someone can challenge you and make you grow as a person rather than only making you feel -- like it's a balance of feeling safe and comfortable with that person but having them push you beyond yourself to become the best version of yourself.
(35:00)
Gina: And I was going to say the rivalry in the first part of your book between Sana and Rachel is so much more complicated because this isn't just a friendship ultimately.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: And it's not a secret, they know they're both attracted to other girls and they both know they're attracted to each other.
Aminah: Yes, but they both want to pretend like they're not which is . . . [Laughs] I don't like her, she just is really interesting and she's really smart and she has the prettiest face I've ever seen but I hate her.
Gina: And her hair smells like pineapples.
Aminah: And her hair smells like pineapples and she also smells like jasmine and I might go out and buy some pineapple shampoo later. It's not a big deal. [Laughs] But I think that's like being a teenager, right? You don't want to . . . I think especially as a young woman you don't want to admit you could have these really intense feelings that could take over and maybe derail this plan you have for your life, especially when you're young. You're like I don't have time to fall in love. I want to make movies or I want to be a surgeon or I want to go on this internship in India. Like I don't have time for love.
(36:05)
Gina: Right. And both characters as you've said are so driven and so on the path.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: Like these are not the teens who are sort of like lost and stoned and unsure.
Aminah: No.
Gina: But then having that clarity and that drive causes other problems like I love how Sana's big secret is not that she's gay.
Aminah: No.
Gina: But it's still very tricky business for her to be out and particularly to be fem.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: I want to ask you to read from a section that's told from Rachel's point-of-view. You write in the third person but we kind of are inside the mind of each character in alternating chapters so this is a section that's from Rachel's point-of-view.
Aminah: Okay, and the highlighted part?
Gina: Uh-huh.
Aminah: "Sana Kahn moved through this world trying to tell everyone in tiny, everyday ways that she was attracted to girls and nobody registered any of them. Flirt, touch, wink, batting her eyelashes, kiss girls, hold hands, brush her insane body up against Rachel's, be obvious in the way that everybody could see and nobody seemed to care about. Not if you looked like Sana. Sana wasn't trapped in a closet; other people just kept building one around her. And as she kept walking out of them they kept building new ones around her."
Gina: What interested you in sort of portraying this side of Sana? Of like being queer and being clear about that and yet no one gets it or no one wants to see that?
Aminah: I think it was . . .
Gina: It plays into a bigger story with her character.
Aminah: It plays into a bigger story with her character about examining what beauty means especially as a young woman and especially as a young woman who doesn't necessarily trade on that in that she benefits from beauty privileges but she's also not straight and she also wants to be a surgeon. And so she's not necessarily like going to profit off of her looks in a traditional manner.
(38:05)
But I think it was also just we conflate gender performance and sexuality a lot and we often assume sexuality based on what someone looks like, whether or not that's fair or true. And then there's also a sense that if you see someone you just assume they're straight and I wanted to play with that idea of her where people just assume she's a popular, straight girl, teenager, and she's constantly brushing up against that because this isn't a coming out story but I think it's true that if you are queer you're constantly coming out to people.
Gina: Do you think that's harder for teens of color? In the kind of environment -- like Rachel and Sana are in this like prep school, rarefied environment.
Aminah: Yeah, and I think that's what makes Rachel so angry. Like she's got a class differential because she's on scholarship. She's Mexican-American. She's Jewish. And then Sana on the other side is part Persian and part South Asian. I wanted to be honest about the fact that that can inform who you are and how you see the world and how you've been treated while also suspending their space and providing them kind of a fairy tale LA magic romance. So I wanted it to not be about the struggle and I wanted to give them space to be carefree not because there aren't struggles and those struggles do inform the way they see the world but because I wanted the focus of the story to be about them falling in love the way any rom-com works.
Gina: Yeah, totally.
(39:40)
Aminah: So it was like trying to balance being honest while also giving this safe space for carefree young girls of color and carefree queer young girls of color. I think both are important because fiction is both a space of play and a space of learning and you need stories that remind people that those struggles are still real and you need stories that also normalize and allow people to have everyday lives and everyday love stories just like anyone else.
Gina: Totally. No, I think you did that so beautifully.
Aminah: Thank you.
Gina: It's one of the great pleasures of reading the book is finding their deeply-rooted cultural specificity. It's just beautifully interwoven, right, of like which neighborhoods when Sana goes to visit her grandparents in Orange County, like the immigrant experience and being each successive generation is so . . . you know . . .
Aminah: The struggles of the third generation are different than the struggles of the second generation or the first generation.
Gina: Yeah.
Aminah: And that was fun to play with. But it was also fun to realize like -- so Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls has these Friday night dinners with her grandparents that are kind of these imposed dinners and they're these very uptight, waspish spaces. And it was fun to find the places where there is an intersection between uptight east coast waspish old money and immigrant culture in Orange County with South Asian and Persian influences, right? The idea your whole family would come together once a week, like I'm Muslim and part Arab and we did that too or we did that even with people who weren't family but they were aunties or uncles. They were like family. So it was like finding those -- finding those commonalities was really funny and really fun because it was kind of unexpected to think of. Like when you realize there are similarities in the ways in which people become clannish or similar it's kind of fun to explore.
Gina: Yeah, it was sort of like the second that I read you writing it it made perfect sense, right? Of of course there are differences among generations. There are these different cultural norms informed by different experience of class and where you grew up.
(41:50)
Aminah: And of course Fara is Sana's mom so she's more likely to rebel against her parents, and Sana rebelling again would be much more of a conformist than her mom. Which is really fun because it's like how are you my child? Everyone's going. How are you my child? You're not behaving the way I would behave. [Laughter] Which is I feel like always the real struggle. And I love exploring the ways in which you have this legacy from the matrilineal line, right? Like who your mother is and who you are, and getting to do that from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter was super fun. And it was super fun to explore the ways in which they have loved and helped and harmed one another in the way that only I think mothers and daughters can.
Gina: Yeah and it was interesting because in contrast Rachel's family is so small.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: Yeah, it's just her and her dad.
Aminah: Yeah.
Gina: And her mom's around but gone.
Aminah: But gone, yeah. She's left them and so that's left this kind of hole and kind of phantom ghost limb in her life that she never wants to deal with but it's always popping up into her thoughts and popping up into the way that she interacts with people around her. But she still has community and she still has -- like even though she feels so isolated and alone I think that she still had people to reach out to. She just didn't always want to. And understandably so. So it's like learning to reach out and let people in is I think a big part of how she grows.
Gina: You belong to a boxing gym.
Aminah: I do.
Gina: How does getting in -- I'm just curious because you write this tension between these characters so well.
Aminah: Thanks.
Gina: And there is some accidental physical altercations that happen between them. [Laughs] It sounds kind of fucked up in this story.
Aminah: I kept trying to break her. So where I started to was I was re-watching the Gilmore Girls revival and the thing I noticed about Rory Gilmore is if you watch Gilmore Girls you'll realize it's actually mostly from Lorelai's perspective, like the POV if you really think about it, the point-of-view, is Rory's mom, Lorelai. So you don't realize how angry she is, like it pops in and out but you don't see it because she kind of keeps a lid on it and her mom doesn't really notice it. So it goes -- it kind of explodes out spectacularly end of season five, season six.
(44:10)
Gina: How angry Rory is.
Aminah: How angry Rory is, yeah. So I wanted to kind of save her from that but I realized the only person that could save Rory Gilmore is Rory Gilmore. So the only gift I could give her was cracking her open earlier so she had a safe space to be angry and to let it out. So I kept trying to crack Sana and she is so good at performing this perfect . . .
Gina: The perfect ponytail, the perfect makeup.
Aminah: The perfect ponytail. She's just like got it down. She's been doing it for so long that cracking her is next to impossible so it was like I'm going to bang up your wrist and then I'm going to bring up your -- like I just kept trying. I'm going to bring in your dad that you're mad at. I'm just going to keep doing things to you and you are just going to keep sailing through them and it just took a lot to crack her. So that's part of how it happened. [Laughs]
Gina: Is that how it feels to you as a writer? Like there are these kind of -- they become, even though as you're setting the world in motion, you're just like "What's up with this character? I can't get to her!"
Aminah: Yeah, she was really difficult to get at because if Rachel doesn't let anyone in then Sana doesn't let anything out, right? Like she's so good at everything is going to be okay. Everything is fine if I can perform what normal looks like, if I can perform this ideal fem good girl, then life will be smooth. Everything's going to be okay with my mom. They'll be nicer to my mom. People won't come at us. Like she's just like learned that is her coping mechanism for dealing with the world and cracking that open when someone's been doing that since childhood is -- I mean since early childhood is wildly difficult. And letting her be vulnerable in the way that she would be angry and letting her let out that anger even in ways that we consider unacceptable is the gift that I wanted to give her, and giving her space to do that. And it's wild how much it still upsets people. They're like "I can't believe she did X when she was mad." I'm like she was really angry and she's been holding on to 17 years of rage. [Laughs] Like she's been keeping it inside. She has to let it out and it's not always going to come out in this ideal, perfect, healthy way the first time. It's going to snap open.
(46:25)
Gina: Right. Right, because she hasn't built any pathways for resolving conflict. It's all . . .
Aminah: No, she's just like bury it down deep and never speak of it again. [Laughter] Like a good immigrant child. Also very waspish again. Like these weird overlaps between friends and wasps.
Gina: It's so true! What are you reading right now?
Aminah: Okay, I just got a copy of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me. Is that -- sorry, it's on my shelf and I'm really excited to read that. I just cracked open Hot Dog Girl by Jennifer Dugan. I just finished Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo. All of these are great -- Like a Love Story, Abdi Nazemian, also beautiful coming-of-age during the AIDS crisis in the late '80s/early '90s in New York. That's what's on my list right now.
Gina: Aminah thank you so much.
Aminah: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me Gina.
Gina: Where can the people find you?
Aminah: The people can find me at aminahmae which is my name, A-M-I-N-A-H-M-A-E, and that's mostly I'm on Instagram. You can find me there on Twitter too or at aminahmae.com if you like websites but I'm mostly on Instagram, especially if you like cat content.
Gina: And obviously anything you're reading you can tag on Instagram #CYGBooks and add Tell Me How You Really Feel to your list.
Aminah: Yeah!
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. Special thanks this week to Melanie Wanga and Solenne Mulan (?) from Binge Audio for helping me record in Paris. They really are the best so if you're in Paris and you need a studio, Binge Studios. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.
Ann: All right, see you on the beach with a book, boo-boo.
Aminatou: Bye boo-boo!