December 8, 2020 • 47 mins
Books: They can transport us, entertain us, show us who we can be, and even get us through hard times. In this episode, Hillary sits down with three fellow book-lovers: mystery novelist (and friend) Louise Penny; return guest Stacey Abrams in her capacity as romance writer (!); and Marley Dias, the 15-year-old founder of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign.
Louise Penny is an award-winning and bestselling author. The latest installment in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, All the Devils Are Here, was published earlier this year.
Stacey Abrams was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia and previously served as the minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives. As the founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count, she has been a major force in the push to advance voting rights and ensure fair elections. She’s also a romance mystery novelist: under the pen name Selena Montgomery, Stacey has published eight books, including Reckless.
Marley Dias is the 15-year old founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, which collects and donates books featuring Black female protagonists to counter the lack of diversity in children’s literature. She is also the author of Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!, and the host and producer of the Netflix series Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Hillary Clinton and this is You and Me Both,
where I get to talk to people I admire about
topics that are important to us. And today we're talking
about books. You know, books have been a part of
my life for as long as I can remember. I
(00:24):
adore reading. It's truly one of my favorite things to do.
I do it every chance I get. All kinds of
books have kept me company, of educated and inspired me.
And I thought, as we're moving in toward the holidays,
we should all be thinking about how we're going to
slow down and read books that will transport us out
(00:45):
of where we are from our quarantine situations. So today
I'll be talking to Marley Dias. Marley, when she was
just ten years old, started one thousand Black Girl Books.
That was her campaign to collect and donate children's books
that featured black girls because she just wasn't seeing books
(01:07):
like that in her classes or in her school library.
I will also be talking to Stacy Abrams. Now you've
heard from Stacy before on this podcast, but this time
we're talking about something very different than politics. We're going
to talk about the romance novels she writes under her
pen name Selena Montgomery. But first I'm talking with award
(01:34):
winning crime novelist Louise Penny. Louise has written sixteen books
in her Inspector Gamash series. They're set in the fictional
town of Three Pines, which is a place that she
invented across the border from Vermont in eastern Quebec, and
(01:54):
she has populated it with some of the most interesting
characters in action. I love her books. I've read every
single one of them. And if you haven't read any
of Louise Penny's books, or you haven't heard Louise, Wow,
you have a real treat coming. I want to start
by saying that I knew of Louise's work before I
(02:18):
knew Louise, and the reason I knew about her and
started reading her with the very first book in her
series years ago, is because my dear dear friend Betsy Evelyn,
was a big fan. And one of the things that
Betsy and I did throughout all the decades of our
(02:39):
friendship was to exchange ideas about books to read and
books that could just literally lift you out of the
day to day. So Louise is one of those writers
who we both mutually fell in love with and then,
as fate would have it, Betsy got to meet Louise
(02:59):
in summer of sixteen, and then I got to meet Louise,
and then we got to be great friends. So I
just can't tell you how pleased I am to be
talking with you today, Louise, And are you Hillary? This
is fantastic home know, well, today we want to talk
about and explore the idea of escaping through what we read.
(03:23):
And I think that's particularly important right now given what's
happening around the world. And so let me start by
asking you, Louise, when did you fall in love with mysteries? Well,
I didn't start reading mysteries until I was probably in
my early teens because I never read Nancy Drew. I
(03:44):
don't know how I missed Nancy Drew, but you fell
told you that's how you started. Absolutely yes, and and
the Hardy Boys, but they were, you know, a distant
second to Nancy Drew. Right, exactly how I could have
missed Nancy Drew. I was reading and Green Gables and
all of the Oh yes, But I remember clearly the
(04:04):
first time because I was a voracious reader as a child,
but never crime novels. And I remember coming up the stairs.
We had a cottage north of Montreal in the Laurentians,
and we were there for the summer, and I came
upstairs and my mother came out of the bedroom and
it was mid afternoon or so, and she was holding
a book and she said, you know, I just finished
(04:25):
this book, and I think you'd like it. And she
handed it to me and it was still warm from
her hands, and it was an Agatha Christie and it
was the first time that my mother and I shared
a book. It's become magic since then, and I've had
such a soft spot for Christie since then as well,
and and for crime novels. One of the questions I'd
(04:46):
love to find out from you is how did you
come to Nancy Drew. I think Nancy Drew was recommended
by the librarian in my public library. And I used
to go with my mother when I was too young
to go by myself, to our local, very small public library,
and the librarian said, oh, I think you'd like this.
(05:07):
It's about a girl who has adventures and solves mysteries.
So that's how I started reading Nancy Drew. And it
was a kind of absurd story that the sixteen year
old girl her father was a widower and she literally
could go anywhere and drive her own roadster. Uh out
to solve mysteries, but it just took me. And then
I discovered Agatha Christie like you did, and fell in
(05:28):
love with how economic her stories were and how clever
they were. But I want to get back to you
because you're the one who's actually producing these extraordinary stories
that give me a lot of delight and escapism. So
tell us how you got started writing mysteries. I wasn't
(05:50):
actually going to write a mystery. I was a journalist
at the CBC and I was tired, and I'd covered
one too many Quebec sovereignty referendum. Quebec has quite stressful politics,
and I had frankly burned out. It is a little
embarrassing to say to you, Hillary Clinton, that I burned
out on Canadian politics. But I I Michael, my husband.
(06:16):
I came home one day and he said, look, I
know you've always wanted to write. If if you want
to quit work in order to write your book, I
will support you. So I quit work and then suffered
five years of writer's block. I got to the stage, Hillary,
where Michael, You're going to work every day? By bye, honey,
good Luck had come home and he stopped asking how
(06:37):
the book was going. It was right up there with
when I turned thirty five and my mother stopped asking
if I'd met any nice man lately. And then I
moved Michael and I moved out of Montreal down south,
quite close to the Vermont border, and I fell in
with a group of women, all of whom were creative,
and they taught me something that should have been self evident,
(06:59):
but I realized is that I was just riddled with
fear and insecurity and something that has been um a
challenge for me most of my life, and that is
the need for the approval of others, or the really
more the fear of disapproval. So what would happen if
I tried and failed and they taught me? And I
saw it in what they did and their courage to
(07:19):
create and put it out there, was that the trying
and the failing and the judgment of others wouldn't kill me.
What was killing me, quietly was the not trying. So
I decided I would write a crime novel, and I
would write it just for myself, just write it for
the joy of it. This happened actually shortly after nine eleven.
I realized that no place is safe, that anything can
(07:43):
happen at any time, and there's no no safety, physical safety.
So I started writing. I wrote for two or three years,
and then I finally I'd finished the book. And do
you want me to go on? Because I feel like
I'm just doing a monologue here, Ghilary. I hate to,
but your eyes are still open. My eyes are open,
My ears are, you know, very open, despite having headphones on.
(08:06):
I think this is such a it's it's not only
a great story about what you did overcoming fear of failure,
overcoming the perfectionist gene that unfortunately afflicts a lot of women,
being willing to do something for yourself that, as you say,
gave joy to you. And then you finished. You know,
(08:28):
I love the characters that you have created, and I've
often heard you say that you created characters that you
would want to spend time with. Take us inside your process,
because it's really the characters that I think drive your
plot and drive the success of your series, because people
want to know what's happening to them. Yeah, there was
(08:51):
conscious partly because I didn't think the books would be published,
so I had to enjoy the process that might be
the only reward I would get. But that whole sense
of the village was done deliberately because of again nine eleven,
and that understanding and profound appreciation that anything can happen
at any time, and that our as I said before,
(09:14):
our physical bodies are never going to be safe. There's
no way. Eventually we'll all die and we don't know how,
we don't know when there's there's no guarantee of physical safety.
There is, however, a way to guarantee emotional and spiritual safety.
And the way to do that and the only way
I can figure out to do that is through a
sense of belonging of community. And that's what I wanted
(09:35):
Three Pines to be, was that safe place for our souls,
for our emotions. Where there are flawed people, there are
kind people. There are people who are occasionally cruel, but
there is beyond all else acceptance, where people are genuinely friends,
where goodness exists. The books are about terror, but at
(09:57):
the end of the day, they're an l get to
goodness and that goodness exists and will triumph I believe
that I've seen it in my life, and it's something
I cling to in these days, that goodness will triumph.
We're taking a quick break. Stay with us. But of course,
just as in life, there is no such thing as
(10:20):
absolute safety, and so the community keeps being interrupted by murder.
For a very small little place, you know, kind of
north of the Vermont border and east turn back, there
are a lot of dead bodies that are there. And
(10:41):
how the different characters, of course react to that and
what they know or what they shouldn't know but don't
realize they do, And and it truly is a joy
to read because you're discovering as you go this underlying
tension between good and evil, between cruelty and kindness. And
(11:05):
I want to sort of circle back to why people
read for escape, especially mysteries. Why is it that the mystery,
the crime story has just sustained itself. I guess from
probably the Greeks to the Romans? Right, do you know, Hillary?
I wish I knew. I think a lot of people
like puzzles, and mysteries are often puzzles, and so you
(11:27):
can escape into who did it? And where the clues
and so you can leave your own troubles behind. I
think with crime novels mysteries, often you know it's going
to be solved, that there will be an end and
an answer, and in this life so rarely are there
actually clear answers to all of our troubles. I think
(11:48):
for my books there's also, as you put your finger on,
there's also the sense of community and belonging that I
think also adds a layer of comfort that the books,
while clearly and happily novels, are actually about other things.
What do you think, like, why do you read crime novels? Well,
I will tell you I read a certain kind of
(12:09):
crime novel because a lot of what's called crime or
thriller novels to me are so formulaic and filled with
bloody violence and without much depth of character development, and
so I don't particularly respond to those. I find them
(12:30):
like just an anvil hitting me in the head as
one more horrible dismemberment of some young woman happens. So
I'm interested in character development along with the mystery, and
we need a setting that is different. You know. One
of the things I love about your books and why
(12:52):
I find that escape in them, is yes, you may
be in the same place in Eastern Quebec, in Three Pine,
in Montreal, you know, in Quebec City. Those are the
places that you have populated. But you feel as though
you're learning something, You're expanding your understanding of a place,
like for example, I personally did not know that people
(13:15):
loyal to the British crown helped to settle eastern Quebec
until I started reading your books. So little things like that,
which are you know, worth noting to, you know, larger
questions about corruption inside police forces, something that you know
we're clearly dealing with right now in our own country.
So I read for plot and character and place and
(13:40):
learning something. And yes, I also like the outcomes of
mysteries because in the vast majority of the ones that
I like, the bad guy gets has come up. And
you know, so I read and I learn, and I escape,
and I can go deeper and I can feel a
connection to your characters. That's what keeps me, you know,
(14:03):
coming back time and again. And I guess I want
to ask in reverse, do you think you started writing
and continue writing as a form of escape. I've never
been asked that before. I didn't realize I did until
Michael got sick, as you know, with dementia, particularly near
(14:25):
the end, and I thought I wouldn't be able to
write through it, but it turned out to be the opposite.
So I would look after Michael and get into bed,
and then I'd come out and I would be able
to escape into this world I had created oddly enough
so that other people could be comforted. Never occurred to
me that I would be the main beneficiary, not only
(14:46):
because I could control it, and I think there was
part of that, but it was so comfortable being with
these friends, and I could write and write and write,
and I could feel all my fear, all the terror
slipping a way. So yeah, yeah, you're right, I do
and through this the pandemic. For the first little while,
I was so distracted and kind of distraught, I found
(15:09):
it difficult to focus. But after that I found it
such a comfort to be able to right and write
what it is I write. I don't write about a
world that's worse than the one I actually live in.
You know that is so meaningful to me to hear
you say that. I think what you have given as
a gift to your millions and millions of readers is
(15:31):
that ability to breathe, to just exhale, to find that
moment of release and some separation of the day to
day pressures and stresses and craziness that we are living through.
So for a million reasons, I am grateful for you
(15:55):
and the characters you have created. And I just can't
wait to see where these characters of yours take us
next time, because there's always going to be a huge
need for escape. Well what you just said, I mean,
I can feel my eyes burning. Thank you. Louise's latest book,
(16:19):
All the Devils Are Here, is on shelves now and
it's terrific. In it, she takes Inspector Gamash and his
family out of Quebec for the first time and transports
them to Paris. You will feel like you're right in Paris,
as yes, crimes are committed and Gamash has to once
(16:40):
again come to the forefront. Look for it now at
your local bookstore. Our next guest needs no introduction. I
know you've heard of Stacy Abrahams, and I hope you've
heard her speaking on this podcast about her work protecting
the vote in Georgia and across our country. But you
(17:01):
might not know that Stacy also writes romantic suspense novels
under the pen name Selena Montgomery. Selena has written eight books,
including two parts of a trilogy that got put on
hold after Stacy was elected to the Georgia House of
Representatives in two thousand and seven. I'm delighted to be
(17:23):
talking to Stacy Abrahams again. I am going to start
by asking Stacy, this extraordinary person whom I have come
to not only admire but have great affection for, how
in the world did you ever start writing romance novels
(17:46):
set the stage for us? Where were you, what were
you doing? And why? So? I have always loved romance novels.
My mom and my great aunt Jeanette actually collected them.
My mom was librarian who kept every book she ever had,
and my great aunt Janette loved them, and so my
sisters and I really grew up loving romance novels. We
(18:07):
graduated from Barbara Cartland to Harlequin and finally into the
Silhouette universe, which was spicier. We also watched soap operas religiously,
so we watched ABC, so you know Bryant's Hope all
my children, but General Hospital was where it was at.
I was an angst written teenager who was not allowed
to date till I was sixteen. So I wrote my
first romance novel, which I think was all of like
(18:28):
fifteen pages, when I was in junior high school. But
it was in law school actually at our mutual alma mater,
when I decided to write a novel. It actually wanted
to write a spye novel. My plan was to write
this espionage novel based on my ex boyfriends dissertation. He
was a chemical physicist and he did his dissertation on
(18:50):
this thing called micro zeolite technology. It was an interesting dissertation,
but the concepts were amazing, and so I'm calling him,
having been one of five people to read his dissertation, saying,
oh my god, you could do these things with it.
And he was like, you can't do any of that,
Like this is why we broke up. You have no imagination.
So I got ready to write the book. Talked to
a few friends who were in law school who've been publishing,
(19:13):
and they said, you're never going to sell a spy novel.
It's and they said, look, publishers don't buy spine novels
by or about women. They said, are you planning for
your characters? To look like you and like, well yeah,
and they said, well, then then you're definitely not going
to sell it because at that point, African American main
characters in suspense just didn't really exist. And so I
(19:36):
thought about it and being a problem solver, I decided, like,
I know, I've read novels about women spies, not anyone black,
but I've I've seen it before and I was like, wait,
it was romance. And so I killed the same number
of people. I wrote the exact same story. I just
made my spies fall in up. So you decide you're
going to do this, and when you started thinking about it,
(19:59):
you knew you wanted your character's, particularly your lead character,
to be an African American woman. Absolutely, And is that
because you had not really seen very many characters who
look like you in these books that you love to
read growing up. That was a huge part of it,
particularly in the romance space. I think by when I
(20:21):
was really working on it, there had been perhaps two
to five women. So Beverly Jenkins, who's sort of the
godmother of black romance, Brenda Jackson, had broken through, but
most black women who were writing in romantic veins were
either relegated to historical fiction, which is what Beverly just
(20:43):
does so extraordinarily well. And then you had on the
other side what was called urban fiction. And what I
wanted to do was I wanted to write about a
chemical physicist. I at one point thought I would be
a physicist. I was, you know, very sad that the
CIA never recruited me to be a spat And so
for me, it was as much about writing stories that
(21:06):
I was never given to read, but it was also
I wanted to write a story where I could live
out my alternate universe fantasy. And it was a multi
racial coalition of spies and my boyfriend is still languishing
in prison in the in the novel, it was a
bad came back for lack of imagining. It did, and
you know, we we we didn't have the nicest breakup
(21:28):
at the time. We got over it, but it was
it was it was about situating myself and situating my
community in this space that we were able to tell,
you know, a range of stories, and I wanted to
be able to see myself, see my siblings, see our
our world included in this broader narrative about what it
(21:49):
meant to be in fiction. I think that first book
was that Rules of Engagement was at your first one?
That was it? And so when did you finish that?
So I finished it during law school. I was on
an intensive semester, which is this program at Yale where
you get to go anywhere and study. I in contrast
to my very exotic selection of books, I went home
(22:10):
to Mississippi to write about the charity tax credit that
had been passed under the Clinton administration. And I really
want to think about how the charity tax credit worked
for religious organizations. And my parents were both ministers, so
I was examining that. So I'm writing this very detailed
treatise on tax policy at the exact same time I
started writing my novel. And one of the moments that
(22:32):
I remember so clearly, I had sent off the first
three chapters. Because if you read all the publishers weekly
tropes about how to sell a novel, I sent the
first three chapters off and it said you you'll expect
a response in twelve to twenty four weeks. I got
a response back in six I did not have a book,
and so I'm in the car with my mom and
(22:55):
I hand her the letter because I'm driving, and she
reads it to me, and then she says, and there
are looking forward to receiving the whole novel. And I
nearly crashed the car on the highway because I'm like,
oh god, there is no book. So I learned I'm
a very fast writer. You had to be. I did. So.
I finished the book in about seven weeks that was published.
And how did because I know what you've published? What seven?
(23:18):
Is that? Right? Eight? One thing that strikes me about
your novels and about the reasons why you do it,
I mean romance and as you rightly said, thrillers spine
novels have been historically very white, so you're venturing into
this genre. Do you have any idea of the tens
(23:39):
of thousands of your books that you've sold, you know,
do you have white readers? Have you met people who say, Hey,
I love your character, or I really related to it,
or I didn't know what to expect, but I'm glad
I picked it up. I do. I I have two
sets of readers that I think we're contrary to what
was expected, because part of the way romance sells is
(23:59):
the covers exactly and the minute a black person, a
person of colors on the cover, You're not only pulled
out of the romance genre and put on your own
special shelf. That shelf is usually out of the way.
You've got to go look for black romance. You have
to go look for Latino romance or A A p I.
And so by declaring my character race, I was removed
(24:23):
from the general space where I could sell my books.
What benefited me actually was two sets of readers, so
white women who would write me and tell me I
don't usually read black romance. And I'm like, there's no
such thing as black romance. There's romance, and the characters
happened to be black. Look, I mean, the romance in
your books is kind of steamy, that kinds across every
(24:44):
possible category. Although I acknowledge that for those who were
thinking they were going to get steamy your My parents
are ministers and my mom's church used to read my books,
so you know, in the current universe of steamy, I
am tea kettle, I am not volcano. So but the
second group that read my book there was a I
(25:05):
got this amazing letter, this guy who called himself that
he was the head of the paper bag gang, and
I'm like, what is this? And This is this white
construction worker who was sick and his wife gave him
a copy of my book and he was like, I
don't read this stuff. And he was like, she's like,
just shut up and read the book. And he liked
(25:25):
it so much he took it with him, but he
wanted to rip off the cover and his wife was like, no,
he's hot, you can't take the cover off. And so
he put it in a brown paper bag and he
took it to work and he shared it with his
friends at the construction site and they started reading my books.
And so I know I have cut across you know,
(25:46):
demographics with my writing. That's so great. And you know,
part of what I've read that you know you've said
is that you you wanted to show that black women
were just as adventurous, uh and a active as any
white woman. And the same for the men. I mean,
you know, the men you write about are equally compelling
(26:09):
and sexy and interesting and all the rest. And I
want to be clear, I do not intend to diminish
culturally specific writing at all. I think it is important,
it is relevant, it is necessary, but it should be
the choice of the author, not the assumption of the
publisher or of the bookstore and bookseller to say that
(26:32):
the only people who would read this are people who
share your phenotype, because I've read everything. I read James Joyce,
and I read Nora Roberts, and i read Walter Mosley
and Beverly Jenkins, and there is no expectation in my
mind that I'm not permitted to read James Joyce because
I'm not a white Irish guy. Exactly why would there
(26:53):
be the presumption that you could not read my books
simply because I described the characters with mocha and chocolates
in as opposed to pale ivory. Exactly how did you
come up with your pen name? Is there a story
behind Montgomery? So? As I said, I started writing in
law school, and as you know, there are two papers
you have to write. My second paper was on the
(27:15):
operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption. I
finished that paper during the end of law school. I
submitted it to the Yale Law and Policy Review and
they they picked it up. So I was going to
be published my my first publication and tax policy at
the exact same time that my romance novel was going
(27:36):
to come to the marketplace. And this is all at
the time that Google was having its debut. If Google
was going to be this real thing, if you looked
up my name trying to buy my romance novel, you
would likely pick up my tax policy. And I didn't
think anyone was interested in reading Romance by Alan Greenspan,
and so I like, well, I'll come up in the
(27:57):
new name. I was watching an A and E biography
of Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha on Bewitched, and I
was like, I like Montgomery, and I thought about her
her evil cousin, Serena, and I was like, I don't
like Serena, but Selena. And so I became Selena Montgomery.
It was about two thirty in the morning, so the
story was much more interesting at night than it is
in the daytime. But that's how I became Selena Montgomery.
(28:20):
And I assumed Google has figured that out, so people
now google you. Stacy Abrahams saw her on TV. Love
what she said, Selena may pop up. So there's a
little cognitive dissonance going on there. But I was never
ashamed of it because part of the reason I loved
writing these stories is that there's a humanity to romance.
(28:42):
There's a humanity to talking about as you said, you know, flawed, intelligent,
interesting people. And in the process of writing, I was
connected even more deeply to the people I wanted to serve,
to the people I lived with and around, and for
me was ever a moment of shame. I mean, it's
(29:02):
fantastic writing, but think about it. I mean, when you
strip it all away, people's relationships, obviously their love relationships,
but also their family relationships. You have a great character
in Reckless Um who's a criminal defense lawyer who had
been orphaned, her relationship with the woman who took her in.
I mean, building relationships and then centering the love interest
(29:27):
in the broader relational situation. I mean, that's how we live,
that's who we are. But your last Selena Montgomery novel
came out in two thousand and nine. So for all
those readers out there, for the paperbag guys, for everybody else,
have you retired from writing romantic novels or should we
(29:52):
expect to come back? So here's what happened. The next novel,
the third in the trilogy, was going to be written
in but that was the year I got elected as
Leader of the House Democrats. I started a new financial
services company, and I kind of ran out a little
bit of time because they wanted me not just to
commit to that book until multi year contract or multi
(30:14):
book contract, and I try to be thoughtful. What I
did that was thoughtless was that I did not tell
the story of the final character in the trilogy. So
I promise I'll get it done. And so Selina will
make her final bow sometime soon, as soon as I
find some time to get it done. But Stacy will
be writing under her multiple personalities for as long as
(30:35):
I have breath. Sounds like a plan to me, my friend.
Thank you so much, Stacy, and keep going, stay well.
It has been a delight. Thank you so much to
Madame Secretary. You can find Stacy's romance novels under her
pen name Selina Montgomery, and they make great holiday gifts
(30:57):
and I love this. She reads only joined a group
of her fellow romance novelists in fundraising for Georgia Democrats.
The effort is called Romancing the Runoff. My last guest
today is only fifteen years old, but boy has she
accomplished a lot in those fifteen years. Right after graduating
(31:21):
from fifth grade, Marley Das pointed out to her parents
that none of the characters and the books that she
read at school looked like her, so she started the
one Thousand Black Girl Books campaign to fill school libraries
and curriculums with children's books that feature black girls as
(31:42):
the lead protagonists. Since then, she's written her own book
called Marley Days, Gets It Done and so can You.
And in addition to all of that, she has a
fantastic show on Netflix called book Marks that's all about
books and reading. And I also loved seeing her featured
(32:04):
at the Democratic National Convention this summer, Marley, I could
not be happier to talk with you again. I loved
seeing you featured at the Democratic Convention. That was really
fun to watch. I hope it was fun for you.
It was. I was definitely nervous and I was apprehensive
about it, but it was so cool to see that
(32:25):
like I represented New Jersey, I represented young people, and
I represented girls, So it was a lot of fun.
That is so great. Well, I want to talk with
you about a lot of different things, but I'm going
to start with one of my favorite subjects and yours,
and that is reading. And I love that. Ever since
you were a little girl, reading has been important to you.
(32:49):
Do you remember the first character in a book that
you saw yourself in? So I had a lot of
opportunities as a little kid to see myself, and I
think for me, presentation was never an issue in my home,
but it was an issue in my school. So whenever
I would go to my local bookstore, my parents, whatever
age I was, I would get that many books. So
(33:09):
when I was too they would buy two books. But
I remember that I kind of started to get hooked
when my dad would only take me because it was
at ten, and my mom was like, I'm not paying
for ten books now, I'm not doing that. So I
think I always had a love for reading, and my
parents had really like fostered that within me by you know,
making it a gift rather than a punishment. Um. But
then when I got to school, everything was assigned. We
(33:31):
didn't have a say. I couldn't choose how many or
when I wanted to read. I just had to do
it when I was told to. And that can definitely
stifle and limit some students, especially if their parents can't
afford or don't have access to books in their home.
So for me, it was like then when I had
the opportunity to kind of have those rigid lines and rules,
they didn't allow for me to see myself. I felt
(33:51):
like the rules were kind of misrepresenting the student body,
who I was and what I believed in. Well, and
then you decided to do something about it. Yeah, Well,
my mom and pushed me to which is what I
really admired and how I first heard about you. What
started your campaign that led to one thousand you know,
black girl books, hashtag and program and and and books
(34:14):
and everything else that you've been doing. Yeah, the campaign
has evolved so much from the beginning, but it was
essentially that, you know, I had to go to school.
Reading became a heavy push, especially towards the endevelopmentary school.
But the books never had black girls as the main character.
And if I wanted to change my library, my parents
could do that easily. But when I complained to my mom,
she kind of explained to me that this issue can
(34:35):
affect you, but also think about the kids that don't
have that access, and she encouraged me to do something
about it because she doesn't like to hear me complain.
It's just a simple parent wanting to solve a problem.
That she was tired of me complaining, so we thought
about it more. We did research, and we learned that
both with the publishing houses, curriculums that are made and teachers,
books are not being pushed that have diverse characters, and
(34:57):
we need to push all types of stories, not stories
of black girls. So I wanted to collect one thousand
books where black girls were the main characters to solve
the issue in my school, but then also to help
kids in Jamaica and then all across the world and
the country to see themselves and to see people that
are not like them. We'll be right back, we'll explain
(35:18):
exactly what you have accomplished. So one thousand black girl
books has now kind of stemmed off into so many
other things. But first the first goal is to collect
and donate books where black girls in the main characters.
Then we extended which we as me and my mom
because she helps me do everything and I don't know everything.
Then she helped me with coming up with the resource
guide that has a list of a thousand books that
(35:39):
we have collected, so the titles, the author, the age level,
so that teachers and educators can find these books and
they don't have the excuse that there are none out there,
because you know, through my work, I realized there are
a ton out there, they're just not in schools. And
now it's kind of transformed into me writing my own book,
which was to encourage people my age to believe that
they like to play basketball, they like to saying if
(36:00):
they like to draw all these interests and my love
of reading can be used to help other people, and
they're not limited to. Social activism is completely separate from
liking things and having fun things to do in your
hobbies and activities. That's a really important point Marley, that
you know sometimes people feel like, well, social activism, you know,
(36:21):
civic change, political campaigns, everything that goes on somewhere else
is not really relevant to your life. But in fact,
whatever you care about, you can find a way of
expressing that and helping other people to care as well.
I think that's part of what you have proved with
your campaign. In fact, I need to congratulate you because
(36:43):
you're the host of a new show on Netflix. Yes,
I have a big deal called Bookmarks. Tell us about that.
Where did the idea come from? And who are some
of the cool interesting people that you've got to meet
through this. So it's been a crazy experience because I've
always had opportunities and sometimes, you know, I get stuff
on my my emails are like, oh, we want you
(37:05):
to be an actor and a model, and I'm like,
I don't do those things. This is not what Riley
dies tres me yourself. But I like being a host
and I like bringing other ideas to the table, and
that's kind of what I've had to do over the
past couple of years. So when it came for an
opportunity to do something with Netflix, I knew it had
to be surrounded by books. I knew it had to
be there. Either had to be about social change or books.
(37:27):
And a book show came onto our desk, and it
was really important for me to focus on making sure
that we had black celebrities reading books about black kids
two families all over the world, and some of the
books talk specifically about being anti racist and the civil
rights movement, but other books are about loving who you
are and appreciating all of your imperfections. So um, they're
(37:48):
experiences that can relate to everybody, and experiences that can
inform you know, young kids and are three to eight
and with really fun pictures and animations and funky outfits
and music. Another cool thing about it is that we
also have the episodes available on YouTube, so that teachers
don't have to use their personal Netflix accounts to show
it to their students. So I pushed, you know, I
(38:09):
have an executive producer credit as well, and I wanted
to make sure that it was accessible to all the
kids out there. That is terrific. Well, you know, one
of the reasons that I wanted to talk with you
is because we're all socially distancing. There's a lot of
remote learning going on, and I think not only I,
but our listeners would really like some book recommendations. So
what have you been reading these days and what would
(38:31):
you recommend to not only the adults listening, but younger
people and even kids. So to all the parents listening.
The first picture book that I want to recommend, Grace
for President by Katie de Puccio, is such a good book.
It's about a young girl who's running for president in
her class and can hopefully encourage, you know, talk about leadership,
talk about education. So I love that book for young kids,
(38:53):
and I know you're a grandma, so it's a great,
great book. Well, I'm definitely getting that one. That's a
subject of very near and dear to uh to my heart.
Give me some other recommendations for you know, older kids, teenagers, adults,
and particularly in light of everything going on right now
in the world. There's so many challenges from obviously the pandemic,
(39:17):
to the you know, the racial reckoning that we've got
to finally as a country be willing to address and
deal with, to the economic crisis that has you know,
ripped away a lot of people's jobs and livelihoods. Do
you have any recommendations for books that you think are
particularly of this moment for different age readers. So I
think a book that for me is of this moment
(39:39):
because my mom she made me read it a couple
of months ago, and I think it helped me a
lot is the Autobiography of Malcolm X. It's not a
black girl book, but it is a book about a
black man, and it's as told to by Alex Haley,
and I think it does two things for me personally.
It took a really close look at how lonely leadership
can be, and I think it took into consideration how
some of us sometimes have to make tough decisions under
(40:02):
a lot of pressure and are judged heavily for who
we are and how we deal with that and the
pains of sometimes and we don't even think about the
people that you know lead our world in small ways,
you know, our church group leader, our best friends, the
people that we look up to, um, how they suffer
a lot and trying to give back to others. Um.
And it also takes a look at how, in many
eyes Malcolm X was seen as a radical, but you know,
(40:24):
the public perception versus reality, and who he was as
a sensitive man who cared for his wife and was
scared for his children and their protection. So I love
that book because I think even though I couldn't relate
to Malcolm X's struggles, I felt like I understood the
point of where leadership can really take a toll on
the body and and make time feel like it's longer
(40:45):
than it is so for teenagers and adults and basically
all kids, but not little kids. Well, but look, I
am a big reader of biography because I do find
a lot of lessons in how other people have faced challenges, setbacks, disappointments,
all the you know, really difficult moments in life. You know,
(41:08):
Nelson Mandela is somebody who I was privileged to meet
and learn a great deal from his long walk to freedom. Uh,
you know as a book that you know talks about
how this little kid grew up to have the capacity,
the strength, the principles to withstand, you know, all those
(41:29):
years in jail and then to lead what was indeed
a peaceful revolution. So there's lots of that, and I
think you're right to say, look, what can we learn
about the struggles that individuals go through, black, white, every background,
but particularly as you understood at a very young age,
(41:49):
you know, you can't be which you can't see, and
so representation in the arts, in obviously books, but way
beyond books is so critical. You know. In your book,
in your introduction, which I really love you basically as
an author, say what you need to read this book is,
(42:09):
and then you list any dream worth following, a strong
belief in something, preferably yourself and your community, a right
sized ego, no room for divas when it comes to activism, patience, curiosity,
people who love you, and trusted adults who want to
(42:29):
help you succeed. I thought that was a pretty good
summary for not just activism but for life, how did
you pull all that together? So I have all these
kind of checklists in my mind about things that I
need and you know, same thing you read out of
the door, you're like while it keys phone for me.
My mom always tries to prepare me with you know, calm, confident,
(42:50):
you know, you know what you're talking about. She never
leaves me in a space where I'm unprepared, and I think,
you know, although I'm not a parent, I feel like
one thing I could do and I tried to do
throughout the whole book, is to equip kids with tools.
I think my favorite one in there is is about
the ego and the right side to ego, because I
have to believe in myself, and you really do have
to you know, know what you're talking about and feel
(43:10):
like it's not not just an inflation of self. Rather
you're filling yourself up with what you need to succeed.
So I never give myself too much credit, and sometimes
I don't give myself enough credit, but I try my
best to always know that, especially in faces of someone
where they you can tell that they're not as confident
in what I'm saying, They're not necessarily as interested that
I'm interested and I know what I want to say,
(43:31):
so it's enough for me to continue forward. Well, I
can only say amen to that, Marley, and I just
love the chance to talk to you again. And I
want to not only encourage all of our listeners to
tune into Netflix or YouTube to see bookmarks and understand
you know what you're trying to do, to give a
platform for books that you know really are not just
(43:55):
representative or diverse, but good books, good books with great
stories and great characters that can change lives. And I
want to commend you for this book. Marley Das gets
it done, and so can you. If you have young
people in your life, please find out about the one
Thousand Black Girls books, and also about Marley's commitment, her
(44:17):
mission to try to really lift up reading and the
joy the experience in in life that you can get
through reading, that you don't have to necessarily go off
and do yourself, because you can live it through somebody else.
So I just can't thank you enough for talking to
me today, Marley. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for
(44:40):
joining me and listening to my conversations with these three
amazing writers. I hope that you're reading something that is
occupying your time and entertaining and informing you. I have
a whole nightstand filled with books that I'm trying to
get through during the this winter when we're still all
(45:02):
inside trying to avoid the virus. I know that I've
really read probably more this past eight months than I
have in the prior eight years, because I had the time,
and I hope you two will have the time to read,
and if you've got little kids around, read to them.
(45:23):
I've done a lot of reading with my grandchildren, kind
of pulling every children's book off of my shelf. Because
it's gonna be a long winter. And this is the
last episode of our first season of our podcast, You
and Me Both. We'll be back though. We're kicking off
season two on February sixteen with more inspiring guests, no
(45:45):
holds barred conversations, and yes, even a few surprises. Until then,
I hope that you stay safe and healthy, catch up
on any of the podcast episodes you missed, and of course,
you know, lose yourself in a book or two. You
and Me Both is brought to you by I Heart Radio.
(46:07):
We're produced by Julie Subran and Kathleen Russo with help
from Juma Aberdeen, Nikki e Tour, Oscar Flores, Brianna Johnson,
Nick Merrill, Lauren Peterson, Rob Russo, and Lona Velmorrow. Our
engineer is Zach mcneiks and the original music is by
(46:27):
Forest Gray. If you like you and me both, share
it with your friends. Let them know they can subscribe
to you and me both on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if
you really want to help us out write a review.
That's a big help in bringing this podcast to new listeners,
(46:48):
and we would love to hear from you. Send your questions, comments,
or book recommendations to you and me both pod at
gmail dot com. I loved getting your emails and was
a sp actually moved by the stories that so many
listeners shared after our episode on mental health. Thanks for listening,
See you next year.
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Hillary Clinton and this is You and Me Both,
where I get to talk to people I admire about
topics that are important to us. And today we're talking
about books. You know, books have been a part of
my life for as long as I can remember. I
(00:24):
adore reading. It's truly one of my favorite things to do.
I do it every chance I get. All kinds of
books have kept me company, of educated and inspired me.
And I thought, as we're moving in toward the holidays,
we should all be thinking about how we're going to
slow down and read books that will transport us out
(00:45):
of where we are from our quarantine situations. So today
I'll be talking to Marley Dias. Marley, when she was
just ten years old, started one thousand Black Girl Books.
That was her campaign to collect and donate children's books
that featured black girls because she just wasn't seeing books
(01:07):
like that in her classes or in her school library.
I will also be talking to Stacy Abrams. Now you've
heard from Stacy before on this podcast, but this time
we're talking about something very different than politics. We're going
to talk about the romance novels she writes under her
pen name Selena Montgomery. But first I'm talking with award
(01:34):
winning crime novelist Louise Penny. Louise has written sixteen books
in her Inspector Gamash series. They're set in the fictional
town of Three Pines, which is a place that she
invented across the border from Vermont in eastern Quebec, and
(01:54):
she has populated it with some of the most interesting
characters in action. I love her books. I've read every
single one of them. And if you haven't read any
of Louise Penny's books, or you haven't heard Louise, Wow,
you have a real treat coming. I want to start
by saying that I knew of Louise's work before I
(02:18):
knew Louise, and the reason I knew about her and
started reading her with the very first book in her
series years ago, is because my dear dear friend Betsy Evelyn,
was a big fan. And one of the things that
Betsy and I did throughout all the decades of our
(02:39):
friendship was to exchange ideas about books to read and
books that could just literally lift you out of the
day to day. So Louise is one of those writers
who we both mutually fell in love with and then,
as fate would have it, Betsy got to meet Louise
(02:59):
in summer of sixteen, and then I got to meet Louise,
and then we got to be great friends. So I
just can't tell you how pleased I am to be
talking with you today, Louise, And are you Hillary? This
is fantastic home know, well, today we want to talk
about and explore the idea of escaping through what we read.
(03:23):
And I think that's particularly important right now given what's
happening around the world. And so let me start by
asking you, Louise, when did you fall in love with mysteries? Well,
I didn't start reading mysteries until I was probably in
my early teens because I never read Nancy Drew. I
(03:44):
don't know how I missed Nancy Drew, but you fell
told you that's how you started. Absolutely yes, and and
the Hardy Boys, but they were, you know, a distant
second to Nancy Drew. Right, exactly how I could have
missed Nancy Drew. I was reading and Green Gables and
all of the Oh yes, But I remember clearly the
(04:04):
first time because I was a voracious reader as a child,
but never crime novels. And I remember coming up the stairs.
We had a cottage north of Montreal in the Laurentians,
and we were there for the summer, and I came
upstairs and my mother came out of the bedroom and
it was mid afternoon or so, and she was holding
a book and she said, you know, I just finished
(04:25):
this book, and I think you'd like it. And she
handed it to me and it was still warm from
her hands, and it was an Agatha Christie and it
was the first time that my mother and I shared
a book. It's become magic since then, and I've had
such a soft spot for Christie since then as well,
and and for crime novels. One of the questions I'd
(04:46):
love to find out from you is how did you
come to Nancy Drew. I think Nancy Drew was recommended
by the librarian in my public library. And I used
to go with my mother when I was too young
to go by myself, to our local, very small public library,
and the librarian said, oh, I think you'd like this.
(05:07):
It's about a girl who has adventures and solves mysteries.
So that's how I started reading Nancy Drew. And it
was a kind of absurd story that the sixteen year
old girl her father was a widower and she literally
could go anywhere and drive her own roadster. Uh out
to solve mysteries, but it just took me. And then
I discovered Agatha Christie like you did, and fell in
(05:28):
love with how economic her stories were and how clever
they were. But I want to get back to you
because you're the one who's actually producing these extraordinary stories
that give me a lot of delight and escapism. So
tell us how you got started writing mysteries. I wasn't
(05:50):
actually going to write a mystery. I was a journalist
at the CBC and I was tired, and I'd covered
one too many Quebec sovereignty referendum. Quebec has quite stressful politics,
and I had frankly burned out. It is a little
embarrassing to say to you, Hillary Clinton, that I burned
out on Canadian politics. But I I Michael, my husband.
(06:16):
I came home one day and he said, look, I
know you've always wanted to write. If if you want
to quit work in order to write your book, I
will support you. So I quit work and then suffered
five years of writer's block. I got to the stage, Hillary,
where Michael, You're going to work every day? By bye, honey,
good Luck had come home and he stopped asking how
(06:37):
the book was going. It was right up there with
when I turned thirty five and my mother stopped asking
if I'd met any nice man lately. And then I
moved Michael and I moved out of Montreal down south,
quite close to the Vermont border, and I fell in
with a group of women, all of whom were creative,
and they taught me something that should have been self evident,
(06:59):
but I realized is that I was just riddled with
fear and insecurity and something that has been um a
challenge for me most of my life, and that is
the need for the approval of others, or the really
more the fear of disapproval. So what would happen if
I tried and failed and they taught me? And I
saw it in what they did and their courage to
(07:19):
create and put it out there, was that the trying
and the failing and the judgment of others wouldn't kill me.
What was killing me, quietly was the not trying. So
I decided I would write a crime novel, and I
would write it just for myself, just write it for
the joy of it. This happened actually shortly after nine eleven.
I realized that no place is safe, that anything can
(07:43):
happen at any time, and there's no no safety, physical safety.
So I started writing. I wrote for two or three years,
and then I finally I'd finished the book. And do
you want me to go on? Because I feel like
I'm just doing a monologue here, Ghilary. I hate to,
but your eyes are still open. My eyes are open,
My ears are, you know, very open, despite having headphones on.
(08:06):
I think this is such a it's it's not only
a great story about what you did overcoming fear of failure,
overcoming the perfectionist gene that unfortunately afflicts a lot of women,
being willing to do something for yourself that, as you say,
gave joy to you. And then you finished. You know,
(08:28):
I love the characters that you have created, and I've
often heard you say that you created characters that you
would want to spend time with. Take us inside your process,
because it's really the characters that I think drive your
plot and drive the success of your series, because people
want to know what's happening to them. Yeah, there was
(08:51):
conscious partly because I didn't think the books would be published,
so I had to enjoy the process that might be
the only reward I would get. But that whole sense
of the village was done deliberately because of again nine eleven,
and that understanding and profound appreciation that anything can happen
at any time, and that our as I said before,
(09:14):
our physical bodies are never going to be safe. There's
no way. Eventually we'll all die and we don't know how,
we don't know when there's there's no guarantee of physical safety.
There is, however, a way to guarantee emotional and spiritual safety.
And the way to do that and the only way
I can figure out to do that is through a
sense of belonging of community. And that's what I wanted
(09:35):
Three Pines to be, was that safe place for our souls,
for our emotions. Where there are flawed people, there are
kind people. There are people who are occasionally cruel, but
there is beyond all else acceptance, where people are genuinely friends,
where goodness exists. The books are about terror, but at
(09:57):
the end of the day, they're an l get to
goodness and that goodness exists and will triumph I believe
that I've seen it in my life, and it's something
I cling to in these days, that goodness will triumph.
We're taking a quick break. Stay with us. But of course,
just as in life, there is no such thing as
(10:20):
absolute safety, and so the community keeps being interrupted by murder.
For a very small little place, you know, kind of
north of the Vermont border and east turn back, there
are a lot of dead bodies that are there. And
(10:41):
how the different characters, of course react to that and
what they know or what they shouldn't know but don't
realize they do, And and it truly is a joy
to read because you're discovering as you go this underlying
tension between good and evil, between cruelty and kindness. And
(11:05):
I want to sort of circle back to why people
read for escape, especially mysteries. Why is it that the mystery,
the crime story has just sustained itself. I guess from
probably the Greeks to the Romans? Right, do you know, Hillary?
I wish I knew. I think a lot of people
like puzzles, and mysteries are often puzzles, and so you
(11:27):
can escape into who did it? And where the clues
and so you can leave your own troubles behind. I
think with crime novels mysteries, often you know it's going
to be solved, that there will be an end and
an answer, and in this life so rarely are there
actually clear answers to all of our troubles. I think
(11:48):
for my books there's also, as you put your finger on,
there's also the sense of community and belonging that I
think also adds a layer of comfort that the books,
while clearly and happily novels, are actually about other things.
What do you think, like, why do you read crime novels? Well,
I will tell you I read a certain kind of
(12:09):
crime novel because a lot of what's called crime or
thriller novels to me are so formulaic and filled with
bloody violence and without much depth of character development, and
so I don't particularly respond to those. I find them
(12:30):
like just an anvil hitting me in the head as
one more horrible dismemberment of some young woman happens. So
I'm interested in character development along with the mystery, and
we need a setting that is different. You know. One
of the things I love about your books and why
(12:52):
I find that escape in them, is yes, you may
be in the same place in Eastern Quebec, in Three Pine,
in Montreal, you know, in Quebec City. Those are the
places that you have populated. But you feel as though
you're learning something, You're expanding your understanding of a place,
like for example, I personally did not know that people
(13:15):
loyal to the British crown helped to settle eastern Quebec
until I started reading your books. So little things like that,
which are you know, worth noting to, you know, larger
questions about corruption inside police forces, something that you know
we're clearly dealing with right now in our own country.
So I read for plot and character and place and
(13:40):
learning something. And yes, I also like the outcomes of
mysteries because in the vast majority of the ones that
I like, the bad guy gets has come up. And
you know, so I read and I learn, and I escape,
and I can go deeper and I can feel a
connection to your characters. That's what keeps me, you know,
(14:03):
coming back time and again. And I guess I want
to ask in reverse, do you think you started writing
and continue writing as a form of escape. I've never
been asked that before. I didn't realize I did until
Michael got sick, as you know, with dementia, particularly near
(14:25):
the end, and I thought I wouldn't be able to
write through it, but it turned out to be the opposite.
So I would look after Michael and get into bed,
and then I'd come out and I would be able
to escape into this world I had created oddly enough
so that other people could be comforted. Never occurred to
me that I would be the main beneficiary, not only
(14:46):
because I could control it, and I think there was
part of that, but it was so comfortable being with
these friends, and I could write and write and write,
and I could feel all my fear, all the terror
slipping a way. So yeah, yeah, you're right, I do
and through this the pandemic. For the first little while,
I was so distracted and kind of distraught, I found
(15:09):
it difficult to focus. But after that I found it
such a comfort to be able to right and write
what it is I write. I don't write about a
world that's worse than the one I actually live in.
You know that is so meaningful to me to hear
you say that. I think what you have given as
a gift to your millions and millions of readers is
(15:31):
that ability to breathe, to just exhale, to find that
moment of release and some separation of the day to
day pressures and stresses and craziness that we are living through.
So for a million reasons, I am grateful for you
(15:55):
and the characters you have created. And I just can't
wait to see where these characters of yours take us
next time, because there's always going to be a huge
need for escape. Well what you just said, I mean,
I can feel my eyes burning. Thank you. Louise's latest book,
(16:19):
All the Devils Are Here, is on shelves now and
it's terrific. In it, she takes Inspector Gamash and his
family out of Quebec for the first time and transports
them to Paris. You will feel like you're right in Paris,
as yes, crimes are committed and Gamash has to once
(16:40):
again come to the forefront. Look for it now at
your local bookstore. Our next guest needs no introduction. I
know you've heard of Stacy Abrahams, and I hope you've
heard her speaking on this podcast about her work protecting
the vote in Georgia and across our country. But you
(17:01):
might not know that Stacy also writes romantic suspense novels
under the pen name Selena Montgomery. Selena has written eight books,
including two parts of a trilogy that got put on
hold after Stacy was elected to the Georgia House of
Representatives in two thousand and seven. I'm delighted to be
(17:23):
talking to Stacy Abrahams again. I am going to start
by asking Stacy, this extraordinary person whom I have come
to not only admire but have great affection for, how
in the world did you ever start writing romance novels
(17:46):
set the stage for us? Where were you, what were
you doing? And why? So? I have always loved romance novels.
My mom and my great aunt Jeanette actually collected them.
My mom was librarian who kept every book she ever had,
and my great aunt Janette loved them, and so my
sisters and I really grew up loving romance novels. We
(18:07):
graduated from Barbara Cartland to Harlequin and finally into the
Silhouette universe, which was spicier. We also watched soap operas religiously,
so we watched ABC, so you know Bryant's Hope all
my children, but General Hospital was where it was at.
I was an angst written teenager who was not allowed
to date till I was sixteen. So I wrote my
first romance novel, which I think was all of like
(18:28):
fifteen pages, when I was in junior high school. But
it was in law school actually at our mutual alma mater,
when I decided to write a novel. It actually wanted
to write a spye novel. My plan was to write
this espionage novel based on my ex boyfriends dissertation. He
was a chemical physicist and he did his dissertation on
(18:50):
this thing called micro zeolite technology. It was an interesting dissertation,
but the concepts were amazing, and so I'm calling him,
having been one of five people to read his dissertation, saying,
oh my god, you could do these things with it.
And he was like, you can't do any of that,
Like this is why we broke up. You have no imagination.
So I got ready to write the book. Talked to
a few friends who were in law school who've been publishing,
(19:13):
and they said, you're never going to sell a spy novel.
It's and they said, look, publishers don't buy spine novels
by or about women. They said, are you planning for
your characters? To look like you and like, well yeah,
and they said, well, then then you're definitely not going
to sell it because at that point, African American main
characters in suspense just didn't really exist. And so I
(19:36):
thought about it and being a problem solver, I decided, like,
I know, I've read novels about women spies, not anyone black,
but I've I've seen it before and I was like, wait,
it was romance. And so I killed the same number
of people. I wrote the exact same story. I just
made my spies fall in up. So you decide you're
going to do this, and when you started thinking about it,
(19:59):
you knew you wanted your character's, particularly your lead character,
to be an African American woman. Absolutely, And is that
because you had not really seen very many characters who
look like you in these books that you love to
read growing up. That was a huge part of it,
particularly in the romance space. I think by when I
(20:21):
was really working on it, there had been perhaps two
to five women. So Beverly Jenkins, who's sort of the
godmother of black romance, Brenda Jackson, had broken through, but
most black women who were writing in romantic veins were
either relegated to historical fiction, which is what Beverly just
(20:43):
does so extraordinarily well. And then you had on the
other side what was called urban fiction. And what I
wanted to do was I wanted to write about a
chemical physicist. I at one point thought I would be
a physicist. I was, you know, very sad that the
CIA never recruited me to be a spat And so
for me, it was as much about writing stories that
(21:06):
I was never given to read, but it was also
I wanted to write a story where I could live
out my alternate universe fantasy. And it was a multi
racial coalition of spies and my boyfriend is still languishing
in prison in the in the novel, it was a
bad came back for lack of imagining. It did, and
you know, we we we didn't have the nicest breakup
(21:28):
at the time. We got over it, but it was
it was it was about situating myself and situating my
community in this space that we were able to tell,
you know, a range of stories, and I wanted to
be able to see myself, see my siblings, see our
our world included in this broader narrative about what it
(21:49):
meant to be in fiction. I think that first book
was that Rules of Engagement was at your first one?
That was it? And so when did you finish that?
So I finished it during law school. I was on
an intensive semester, which is this program at Yale where
you get to go anywhere and study. I in contrast
to my very exotic selection of books, I went home
(22:10):
to Mississippi to write about the charity tax credit that
had been passed under the Clinton administration. And I really
want to think about how the charity tax credit worked
for religious organizations. And my parents were both ministers, so
I was examining that. So I'm writing this very detailed
treatise on tax policy at the exact same time I
started writing my novel. And one of the moments that
(22:32):
I remember so clearly, I had sent off the first
three chapters. Because if you read all the publishers weekly
tropes about how to sell a novel, I sent the
first three chapters off and it said you you'll expect
a response in twelve to twenty four weeks. I got
a response back in six I did not have a book,
and so I'm in the car with my mom and
(22:55):
I hand her the letter because I'm driving, and she
reads it to me, and then she says, and there
are looking forward to receiving the whole novel. And I
nearly crashed the car on the highway because I'm like,
oh god, there is no book. So I learned I'm
a very fast writer. You had to be. I did. So.
I finished the book in about seven weeks that was published.
And how did because I know what you've published? What seven?
(23:18):
Is that? Right? Eight? One thing that strikes me about
your novels and about the reasons why you do it,
I mean romance and as you rightly said, thrillers spine
novels have been historically very white, so you're venturing into
this genre. Do you have any idea of the tens
(23:39):
of thousands of your books that you've sold, you know,
do you have white readers? Have you met people who say, Hey,
I love your character, or I really related to it,
or I didn't know what to expect, but I'm glad
I picked it up. I do. I I have two
sets of readers that I think we're contrary to what
was expected, because part of the way romance sells is
(23:59):
the covers exactly and the minute a black person, a
person of colors on the cover, You're not only pulled
out of the romance genre and put on your own
special shelf. That shelf is usually out of the way.
You've got to go look for black romance. You have
to go look for Latino romance or A A p I.
And so by declaring my character race, I was removed
(24:23):
from the general space where I could sell my books.
What benefited me actually was two sets of readers, so
white women who would write me and tell me I
don't usually read black romance. And I'm like, there's no
such thing as black romance. There's romance, and the characters
happened to be black. Look, I mean, the romance in
your books is kind of steamy, that kinds across every
(24:44):
possible category. Although I acknowledge that for those who were
thinking they were going to get steamy your My parents
are ministers and my mom's church used to read my books,
so you know, in the current universe of steamy, I
am tea kettle, I am not volcano. So but the
second group that read my book there was a I
(25:05):
got this amazing letter, this guy who called himself that
he was the head of the paper bag gang, and
I'm like, what is this? And This is this white
construction worker who was sick and his wife gave him
a copy of my book and he was like, I
don't read this stuff. And he was like, she's like,
just shut up and read the book. And he liked
(25:25):
it so much he took it with him, but he
wanted to rip off the cover and his wife was like, no,
he's hot, you can't take the cover off. And so
he put it in a brown paper bag and he
took it to work and he shared it with his
friends at the construction site and they started reading my books.
And so I know I have cut across you know,
(25:46):
demographics with my writing. That's so great. And you know,
part of what I've read that you know you've said
is that you you wanted to show that black women
were just as adventurous, uh and a active as any
white woman. And the same for the men. I mean,
you know, the men you write about are equally compelling
(26:09):
and sexy and interesting and all the rest. And I
want to be clear, I do not intend to diminish
culturally specific writing at all. I think it is important,
it is relevant, it is necessary, but it should be
the choice of the author, not the assumption of the
publisher or of the bookstore and bookseller to say that
(26:32):
the only people who would read this are people who
share your phenotype, because I've read everything. I read James Joyce,
and I read Nora Roberts, and i read Walter Mosley
and Beverly Jenkins, and there is no expectation in my
mind that I'm not permitted to read James Joyce because
I'm not a white Irish guy. Exactly why would there
(26:53):
be the presumption that you could not read my books
simply because I described the characters with mocha and chocolates
in as opposed to pale ivory. Exactly how did you
come up with your pen name? Is there a story
behind Montgomery? So? As I said, I started writing in
law school, and as you know, there are two papers
you have to write. My second paper was on the
(27:15):
operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption. I
finished that paper during the end of law school. I
submitted it to the Yale Law and Policy Review and
they they picked it up. So I was going to
be published my my first publication and tax policy at
the exact same time that my romance novel was going
(27:36):
to come to the marketplace. And this is all at
the time that Google was having its debut. If Google
was going to be this real thing, if you looked
up my name trying to buy my romance novel, you
would likely pick up my tax policy. And I didn't
think anyone was interested in reading Romance by Alan Greenspan,
and so I like, well, I'll come up in the
(27:57):
new name. I was watching an A and E biography
of Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha on Bewitched, and I
was like, I like Montgomery, and I thought about her
her evil cousin, Serena, and I was like, I don't
like Serena, but Selena. And so I became Selena Montgomery.
It was about two thirty in the morning, so the
story was much more interesting at night than it is
in the daytime. But that's how I became Selena Montgomery.
(28:20):
And I assumed Google has figured that out, so people
now google you. Stacy Abrahams saw her on TV. Love
what she said, Selena may pop up. So there's a
little cognitive dissonance going on there. But I was never
ashamed of it because part of the reason I loved
writing these stories is that there's a humanity to romance.
(28:42):
There's a humanity to talking about as you said, you know, flawed, intelligent,
interesting people. And in the process of writing, I was
connected even more deeply to the people I wanted to serve,
to the people I lived with and around, and for
me was ever a moment of shame. I mean, it's
(29:02):
fantastic writing, but think about it. I mean, when you
strip it all away, people's relationships, obviously their love relationships,
but also their family relationships. You have a great character
in Reckless Um who's a criminal defense lawyer who had
been orphaned, her relationship with the woman who took her in.
I mean, building relationships and then centering the love interest
(29:27):
in the broader relational situation. I mean, that's how we live,
that's who we are. But your last Selena Montgomery novel
came out in two thousand and nine. So for all
those readers out there, for the paperbag guys, for everybody else,
have you retired from writing romantic novels or should we
(29:52):
expect to come back? So here's what happened. The next novel,
the third in the trilogy, was going to be written
in but that was the year I got elected as
Leader of the House Democrats. I started a new financial
services company, and I kind of ran out a little
bit of time because they wanted me not just to
commit to that book until multi year contract or multi
(30:14):
book contract, and I try to be thoughtful. What I
did that was thoughtless was that I did not tell
the story of the final character in the trilogy. So
I promise I'll get it done. And so Selina will
make her final bow sometime soon, as soon as I
find some time to get it done. But Stacy will
be writing under her multiple personalities for as long as
(30:35):
I have breath. Sounds like a plan to me, my friend.
Thank you so much, Stacy, and keep going, stay well.
It has been a delight. Thank you so much to
Madame Secretary. You can find Stacy's romance novels under her
pen name Selina Montgomery, and they make great holiday gifts
(30:57):
and I love this. She reads only joined a group
of her fellow romance novelists in fundraising for Georgia Democrats.
The effort is called Romancing the Runoff. My last guest
today is only fifteen years old, but boy has she
accomplished a lot in those fifteen years. Right after graduating
(31:21):
from fifth grade, Marley Das pointed out to her parents
that none of the characters and the books that she
read at school looked like her, so she started the
one Thousand Black Girl Books campaign to fill school libraries
and curriculums with children's books that feature black girls as
(31:42):
the lead protagonists. Since then, she's written her own book
called Marley Days, Gets It Done and so can You.
And in addition to all of that, she has a
fantastic show on Netflix called book Marks that's all about
books and reading. And I also loved seeing her featured
(32:04):
at the Democratic National Convention this summer, Marley, I could
not be happier to talk with you again. I loved
seeing you featured at the Democratic Convention. That was really
fun to watch. I hope it was fun for you.
It was. I was definitely nervous and I was apprehensive
about it, but it was so cool to see that
(32:25):
like I represented New Jersey, I represented young people, and
I represented girls, So it was a lot of fun.
That is so great. Well, I want to talk with
you about a lot of different things, but I'm going
to start with one of my favorite subjects and yours,
and that is reading. And I love that. Ever since
you were a little girl, reading has been important to you.
(32:49):
Do you remember the first character in a book that
you saw yourself in? So I had a lot of
opportunities as a little kid to see myself, and I
think for me, presentation was never an issue in my home,
but it was an issue in my school. So whenever
I would go to my local bookstore, my parents, whatever
age I was, I would get that many books. So
(33:09):
when I was too they would buy two books. But
I remember that I kind of started to get hooked
when my dad would only take me because it was
at ten, and my mom was like, I'm not paying
for ten books now, I'm not doing that. So I
think I always had a love for reading, and my
parents had really like fostered that within me by you know,
making it a gift rather than a punishment. Um. But
then when I got to school, everything was assigned. We
(33:31):
didn't have a say. I couldn't choose how many or
when I wanted to read. I just had to do
it when I was told to. And that can definitely
stifle and limit some students, especially if their parents can't
afford or don't have access to books in their home.
So for me, it was like then when I had
the opportunity to kind of have those rigid lines and rules,
they didn't allow for me to see myself. I felt
(33:51):
like the rules were kind of misrepresenting the student body,
who I was and what I believed in. Well, and
then you decided to do something about it. Yeah, Well,
my mom and pushed me to which is what I
really admired and how I first heard about you. What
started your campaign that led to one thousand you know,
black girl books, hashtag and program and and and books
(34:14):
and everything else that you've been doing. Yeah, the campaign
has evolved so much from the beginning, but it was
essentially that, you know, I had to go to school.
Reading became a heavy push, especially towards the endevelopmentary school.
But the books never had black girls as the main character.
And if I wanted to change my library, my parents
could do that easily. But when I complained to my mom,
she kind of explained to me that this issue can
(34:35):
affect you, but also think about the kids that don't
have that access, and she encouraged me to do something
about it because she doesn't like to hear me complain.
It's just a simple parent wanting to solve a problem.
That she was tired of me complaining, so we thought
about it more. We did research, and we learned that
both with the publishing houses, curriculums that are made and teachers,
books are not being pushed that have diverse characters, and
(34:57):
we need to push all types of stories, not stories
of black girls. So I wanted to collect one thousand
books where black girls were the main characters to solve
the issue in my school, but then also to help
kids in Jamaica and then all across the world and
the country to see themselves and to see people that
are not like them. We'll be right back, we'll explain
(35:18):
exactly what you have accomplished. So one thousand black girl
books has now kind of stemmed off into so many
other things. But first the first goal is to collect
and donate books where black girls in the main characters.
Then we extended which we as me and my mom
because she helps me do everything and I don't know everything.
Then she helped me with coming up with the resource
guide that has a list of a thousand books that
(35:39):
we have collected, so the titles, the author, the age level,
so that teachers and educators can find these books and
they don't have the excuse that there are none out there,
because you know, through my work, I realized there are
a ton out there, they're just not in schools. And
now it's kind of transformed into me writing my own book,
which was to encourage people my age to believe that
they like to play basketball, they like to saying if
(36:00):
they like to draw all these interests and my love
of reading can be used to help other people, and
they're not limited to. Social activism is completely separate from
liking things and having fun things to do in your
hobbies and activities. That's a really important point Marley, that
you know sometimes people feel like, well, social activism, you know,
(36:21):
civic change, political campaigns, everything that goes on somewhere else
is not really relevant to your life. But in fact,
whatever you care about, you can find a way of
expressing that and helping other people to care as well.
I think that's part of what you have proved with
your campaign. In fact, I need to congratulate you because
(36:43):
you're the host of a new show on Netflix. Yes,
I have a big deal called Bookmarks. Tell us about that.
Where did the idea come from? And who are some
of the cool interesting people that you've got to meet
through this. So it's been a crazy experience because I've
always had opportunities and sometimes, you know, I get stuff
on my my emails are like, oh, we want you
(37:05):
to be an actor and a model, and I'm like,
I don't do those things. This is not what Riley
dies tres me yourself. But I like being a host
and I like bringing other ideas to the table, and
that's kind of what I've had to do over the
past couple of years. So when it came for an
opportunity to do something with Netflix, I knew it had
to be surrounded by books. I knew it had to
be there. Either had to be about social change or books.
(37:27):
And a book show came onto our desk, and it
was really important for me to focus on making sure
that we had black celebrities reading books about black kids
two families all over the world, and some of the
books talk specifically about being anti racist and the civil
rights movement, but other books are about loving who you
are and appreciating all of your imperfections. So um, they're
(37:48):
experiences that can relate to everybody, and experiences that can
inform you know, young kids and are three to eight
and with really fun pictures and animations and funky outfits
and music. Another cool thing about it is that we
also have the episodes available on YouTube, so that teachers
don't have to use their personal Netflix accounts to show
it to their students. So I pushed, you know, I
(38:09):
have an executive producer credit as well, and I wanted
to make sure that it was accessible to all the
kids out there. That is terrific. Well, you know, one
of the reasons that I wanted to talk with you
is because we're all socially distancing. There's a lot of
remote learning going on, and I think not only I,
but our listeners would really like some book recommendations. So
what have you been reading these days and what would
(38:31):
you recommend to not only the adults listening, but younger
people and even kids. So to all the parents listening.
The first picture book that I want to recommend, Grace
for President by Katie de Puccio, is such a good book.
It's about a young girl who's running for president in
her class and can hopefully encourage, you know, talk about leadership,
talk about education. So I love that book for young kids,
(38:53):
and I know you're a grandma, so it's a great,
great book. Well, I'm definitely getting that one. That's a
subject of very near and dear to uh to my heart.
Give me some other recommendations for you know, older kids, teenagers, adults,
and particularly in light of everything going on right now
in the world. There's so many challenges from obviously the pandemic,
(39:17):
to the you know, the racial reckoning that we've got
to finally as a country be willing to address and
deal with, to the economic crisis that has you know,
ripped away a lot of people's jobs and livelihoods. Do
you have any recommendations for books that you think are
particularly of this moment for different age readers. So I
think a book that for me is of this moment
(39:39):
because my mom she made me read it a couple
of months ago, and I think it helped me a
lot is the Autobiography of Malcolm X. It's not a
black girl book, but it is a book about a
black man, and it's as told to by Alex Haley,
and I think it does two things for me personally.
It took a really close look at how lonely leadership
can be, and I think it took into consideration how
some of us sometimes have to make tough decisions under
(40:02):
a lot of pressure and are judged heavily for who
we are and how we deal with that and the
pains of sometimes and we don't even think about the
people that you know lead our world in small ways,
you know, our church group leader, our best friends, the
people that we look up to, um, how they suffer
a lot and trying to give back to others. Um.
And it also takes a look at how, in many
eyes Malcolm X was seen as a radical, but you know,
(40:24):
the public perception versus reality, and who he was as
a sensitive man who cared for his wife and was
scared for his children and their protection. So I love
that book because I think even though I couldn't relate
to Malcolm X's struggles, I felt like I understood the
point of where leadership can really take a toll on
the body and and make time feel like it's longer
(40:45):
than it is so for teenagers and adults and basically
all kids, but not little kids. Well, but look, I
am a big reader of biography because I do find
a lot of lessons in how other people have faced challenges, setbacks, disappointments,
all the you know, really difficult moments in life. You know,
(41:08):
Nelson Mandela is somebody who I was privileged to meet
and learn a great deal from his long walk to freedom. Uh,
you know as a book that you know talks about
how this little kid grew up to have the capacity,
the strength, the principles to withstand, you know, all those
(41:29):
years in jail and then to lead what was indeed
a peaceful revolution. So there's lots of that, and I
think you're right to say, look, what can we learn
about the struggles that individuals go through, black, white, every background,
but particularly as you understood at a very young age,
(41:49):
you know, you can't be which you can't see, and
so representation in the arts, in obviously books, but way
beyond books is so critical. You know. In your book,
in your introduction, which I really love you basically as
an author, say what you need to read this book is,
(42:09):
and then you list any dream worth following, a strong
belief in something, preferably yourself and your community, a right
sized ego, no room for divas when it comes to activism, patience, curiosity,
people who love you, and trusted adults who want to
(42:29):
help you succeed. I thought that was a pretty good
summary for not just activism but for life, how did
you pull all that together? So I have all these
kind of checklists in my mind about things that I
need and you know, same thing you read out of
the door, you're like while it keys phone for me.
My mom always tries to prepare me with you know, calm, confident,
(42:50):
you know, you know what you're talking about. She never
leaves me in a space where I'm unprepared, and I think,
you know, although I'm not a parent, I feel like
one thing I could do and I tried to do
throughout the whole book, is to equip kids with tools.
I think my favorite one in there is is about
the ego and the right side to ego, because I
have to believe in myself, and you really do have
to you know, know what you're talking about and feel
(43:10):
like it's not not just an inflation of self. Rather
you're filling yourself up with what you need to succeed.
So I never give myself too much credit, and sometimes
I don't give myself enough credit, but I try my
best to always know that, especially in faces of someone
where they you can tell that they're not as confident
in what I'm saying, They're not necessarily as interested that
I'm interested and I know what I want to say,
(43:31):
so it's enough for me to continue forward. Well, I
can only say amen to that, Marley, and I just
love the chance to talk to you again. And I
want to not only encourage all of our listeners to
tune into Netflix or YouTube to see bookmarks and understand
you know what you're trying to do, to give a
platform for books that you know really are not just
(43:55):
representative or diverse, but good books, good books with great
stories and great characters that can change lives. And I
want to commend you for this book. Marley Das gets
it done, and so can you. If you have young
people in your life, please find out about the one
Thousand Black Girls books, and also about Marley's commitment, her
(44:17):
mission to try to really lift up reading and the
joy the experience in in life that you can get
through reading, that you don't have to necessarily go off
and do yourself, because you can live it through somebody else.
So I just can't thank you enough for talking to
me today, Marley. Thank you so much. Well, thanks for
(44:40):
joining me and listening to my conversations with these three
amazing writers. I hope that you're reading something that is
occupying your time and entertaining and informing you. I have
a whole nightstand filled with books that I'm trying to
get through during the this winter when we're still all
(45:02):
inside trying to avoid the virus. I know that I've
really read probably more this past eight months than I
have in the prior eight years, because I had the time,
and I hope you two will have the time to read,
and if you've got little kids around, read to them.
(45:23):
I've done a lot of reading with my grandchildren, kind
of pulling every children's book off of my shelf. Because
it's gonna be a long winter. And this is the
last episode of our first season of our podcast, You
and Me Both. We'll be back though. We're kicking off
season two on February sixteen with more inspiring guests, no
(45:45):
holds barred conversations, and yes, even a few surprises. Until then,
I hope that you stay safe and healthy, catch up
on any of the podcast episodes you missed, and of course,
you know, lose yourself in a book or two. You
and Me Both is brought to you by I Heart Radio.
(46:07):
We're produced by Julie Subran and Kathleen Russo with help
from Juma Aberdeen, Nikki e Tour, Oscar Flores, Brianna Johnson,
Nick Merrill, Lauren Peterson, Rob Russo, and Lona Velmorrow. Our
engineer is Zach mcneiks and the original music is by
(46:27):
Forest Gray. If you like you and me both, share
it with your friends. Let them know they can subscribe
to you and me both on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if
you really want to help us out write a review.
That's a big help in bringing this podcast to new listeners,
(46:48):
and we would love to hear from you. Send your questions, comments,
or book recommendations to you and me both pod at
gmail dot com. I loved getting your emails and was
a sp actually moved by the stories that so many
listeners shared after our episode on mental health. Thanks for listening,
See you next year.
Host
Hillary Clinton
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