︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, consultant, and the creator and host of this podcast. For those of you just tuning in, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
This episode begins with a story from Emma of Girls on the Page, who shares thoughts on poetry and pace. Here's more from Emma.
Emma Leokadia: I'm Emma, and I run Girls on the Page—a website and Instagram account that celebrates the work of women in literature. I feel like when I have a stack of novels piling up, it's easy to get overwhelmed or to feel like I don't have the time that I wish I had to read everything that I want to read. So when I get to that point, usually I'll gravitate towards poetry instead because I feel like poetry truly does demand a certain slowness.
There's a beautiful story in the spring issue of The Sewanee Review by Susan Minot called "Experience Manager," and in it, she writes, "Dreams are voluptuous, then harrowing, like tiny vacations every night." And I feel like this applies to poems as well. Voluptuous, often harrowing mini-vacations from the every day that force you to take a minute and reflect upon what you've just read.
A poem by Anne Michaels did that for me recently, and I was transported to this beautiful, hazy, soft-focus, off-kilter world. And it reminded me of the dream fog that you sometimes get when you wake up—when you know you're awake, but you also know that you've just been somewhere else. You've just come back, and you still have a limb, so to speak, in another realm. In the spirit of that feeling, I am going to share these few lines from "Women on a Beach" by Anne Michaels.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Emma for sharing. Again, the poem she mentioned is "Women on a Beach" by Anne Michaels, and you can follow Emma on social @girlsonthepage. Now, here's my conversation with Tembe Denton-Hurst.
︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: The world can learn a lot from Tembe Denton-Hurst—like how to tell a story and, perhaps more importantly, how to tell the truth. She does this and more in her stunning debut novel, Homebodies, which "is a testament to those trying to be heard and loved in a world that refuses to make space."
In this electric story, readers follow Mickey Hayward, a writer in New York navigating the crossroads of personal, professional, and romantic tumult. After an unjust, devastating job loss, Mickey takes the reigns by crafting a letter detailing the racism and sexism she's faced as a Black woman in media. But when the letter goes unanswered, in tandem with rising tensions in her relationship, Mickey finds herself paralyzed with doubt and uncertainty. Seeking reprieve, the mounting pressure culminates in Mickey's return to her hometown.
Page after page, Tembe takes us through Mickey's past and present milestones, and as we get to know Mickey's world, readers can't help but wonder: What does it mean to truly feel at home in our lives—and ourselves?
For Tembe, writing Mickey's story is a way to help others feel seen. And in this interview, she shared more about her life as a writer, her evolving definition of ambition, and the idea of legacy on and off the page.
It's hard to do Homebodies justice in this introduction but trust me when I say that Tembe's passion is present in every sentence. As she writes in the book: "Sometimes heartbreak makes you bold." So without giving too much more away, here's my conversation with Tembe Denton-Hurst, author of Homebodies.
︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: What do you hate right now? [Laughs]
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I hate everything. Oh my God. I hate everything all the time. ... I think I just love to criticize things. I love to pick things apart. I'm very judgmental in that way ... just because I think, well, one, I'm a Virgo, so I think that that doesn't help things, but it's just insane attention to the intention of work or a little bit of an obsession with excellence in a sense. Whatever that nebulous thing might be. And so, yes, it makes me a professional hater. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's a lot to carry day to day. [Laughs]
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I don't hate celebrities ... I'm very anti-celebrity culture in a sense. So I don't like most celebrities.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So, who's a celebrity who changes that [for you]?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Oscar Isaac. He's so cute. I love him.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Mm-hmm. Yeah. He seems like a good hugger!
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Right. Yeah! Who else do I love? I think Tracee Ellis Ross is pretty fabulous. A lot of musicians I really enjoy. I just really like music. So I think that I'm not really a celebrity hater in that sense. Maybe it's just actors for me where I'm like, whatever.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's probably just because we can't seem to escape their lives
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Exactly. I think that's what it is. I feel impressed upon [by them]. When I was young, I hated The Jonas Brothers and not because of anything that they were doing, but just because of how much we were talking about them all the time. I just wanted them to go away, and I was like, eventually, they will go away. And they did for a little while, and then they came back, and I was like: Oh my God, now you guys want to reinvigorate your career. Here we go again. But thankfully, I was no longer 12 and 13, so it wasn't the same level of obsession happening with my peers.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's interesting the things that make our days and take up headspace, just going through different phases in our lives.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Mm-hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What are you paying attention to right now?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I love Gospel music. I recently went to Solange's "Eldorado Ballroom," where she put it on an examination of divine art, I guess. Art that's like worship art and religious art. And she had The Clark Sisters there, and they're one of my favorite groups of all time. And it was a tribute to Twinkie Clark, who wrote a lot of their songs and is a producer of the group. She's just such a musical genius, and I admire her work so much. I'm just very, very obsessed with them. So I enjoy listening to Gospel.
I enjoy working out. That's been my post-book thing. Once I finished writing, I immediately decided I needed a new hobby ... something to replace that kind of 5:00 AM time slot, so I started going to the gym.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What is your gym regimen like?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: It's weights. I work out with my trainer twice a week. So I do that, but then I also walk, or I'll lift heavy weights. I really love to lift heavy weights. I like moving heavy things. It makes me feel very strong. So it's nice.
So yeah, I love to read also. I'm a big bookworm. I'm a lover of books, a buyer of books. I feel that's also a separate hobby. [Laughs] I'm a collector of books, I guess you could say. But yeah, I pay a lot of attention to books. Before I wrote a book, I was just such an avid reader. I love to read.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is there a story that you've read recently that's kind of slowed you down or impacted your relationship with pace?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I read this really thin novella called Francisco, and I think it was written and came out in the '70s or something like that. And then it went out of print, and it was brought back. It's so weird. It has a very surreal vibe, and ... it's not necessarily like what's happening is surreal, but the writing style is a little off-kilter. The main character is a little wacky. It's about this Black woman who is in California at the time and a slice of her life essentially. And this man that she loves, who's not that great to her, says mean things to her, but she sticks with him anyway. She's self-conscious of the fact that she kind of doesn't like him.
But what's so fascinating too is that at the very end of the book—it's almost an epilogue situation where she's like talking directly to the reader, like an author's note—where she's talking about how she's such a different person now and she found God and that the guy who was so mean to her, ended up being her husband of most of her life, and they, I guess I figured it out. He turned his life over to Jesus, and they've been very religious ever since. He passed away, and she was just like, he was the best person I ever met. It was just very fascinating. But the book itself—the actual prose—was just really interesting. It was one of those books where I cared more about the writing than I did about the plot, I guess.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that tends to be what I lean toward as well. Do you feel like certain books come into your life at the right time?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Definitely.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is there a book that you're hoping comes into your life?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I feel like books kind of tell me what I haven't understood if that makes sense. There will be things that I read, and it completely shifts my perspective, but never in a way that I expect it to. I feel whenever I've sought out a specific answer; I never receive what I'm looking for. It's always when I'm just feeling my way through something or thinking about something, and something will kind of unintentionally pop up for me. So I guess I'm looking for stories that surprise me in some way or change the way that I look at craft or the way that a story can be told.
I mean, I think as much as I look at books, I also watch TV a lot for that too. Like structure, the way that a narrative is crafted. And sometimes I'll be watching something, I'm like, oh my god, that was brilliant. Books will have that effect on me too. The way that something is set up, it's like, oh, the way that you carried us through the story and then deposited; it just feels very masterful and very intentional.
And so, what am I looking for, and what am I hoping to get? I don't know what kind of story I'm hoping comes to me. I think at some point, I have to reread certain books because there are some books I feel I read when I was too young. I guess those stories are the stories that I'm hoping I'll be ready to read again soon.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Have you had to sort of take a step back since writing Homebodies? How has your relationship with reading changed?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: It's tumultuous in some ways. Some months, I have a really good reading month. I'm like: I read five books this month. Sometimes it's one or two or whatever. But I think because I was writing so much. And I started writing Homebodiesin, I want to say March of 2020, and then I finished in May of 2021, so it was a little while. And it was definitely at my pace. Then once it was sold and with my publisher, then it wasn't really at my pace anymore, and I procrastinated on my edits a lot. And so I ended up rewriting the entire book in like six weeks. That was insane, and so I needed to really chill after that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Was there a reason that you just couldn't bring yourself to the page? Were you just exhausted?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think a little exhausted, a little apprehensive. Also, just eager to just live my life. I didn't feel like writing, you know? Sometimes, I need a healthy amount of pressure to get it done. They gave me four months to do my edits, and I almost felt it was too much time.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Interesting. So you work well under pressure?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah, or tighter deadlines. I need to be able to sink into a project. And then also working full-time on top of that; it was a lot to balance at once.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I want to talk obviously a lot about Homebodies, but I did want to talk about your day job, too, what you do for The Strategist and our specific areas of interest, which are beauty and books and if there have been unexpected parallels in writing about the two, you know, how has beauty informed your love of stories or vice versa?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I kind of have this thing that I always say, which is: If you want to figure out what a culture cares about, look at what they find beautiful." For me, beauty has always been a way to discuss culture and vice versa. And I think that the way that we interact with beauty and the idea of adornment and the idea of adjusting and performing beauty or the choices that we make around that, there's a lot of things to ponder, and you can spend a lot of time thinking about that.
In relation to books, I mean, they both tell stories in a way, and so that's kind of the relation for me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Are there any unexpected challenges that come with covering those two?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: With books no, because I think a lot of times I'm writing a reading list, or I'm asking other people about their things, or I'm talking to writers about the books that they read. So it's much more interview heavy and interview-based.
I'd say when it comes to beauty, a lot of it is more research and digging into the science behind something, especially if it's like skincare, things like that. Or it's culture: so that's me asserting myself as an expert or just asserting my perspective as a valid one—which existing in some ways, on the periphery of the industry for a long time, or the women that look like me being in the periphery of the industry intentionally in a lot of ways because I mean, not the periphery for me personally, but periphery as far as the mainstream goes, asserting myself as an expert in that space has been—I wouldn't want to say it's challenging because it's not. And I think being part of an institution helps with that a lot. That's the platform, so people are going to listen, they're going to pay attention, but I understand that my subjectivity is a little bit different. My perspective is also going to be different as well.
So I don't know if there are challenges moreso balancing the way that I see things with making that legible for other people because I know that I have a different perspective from my editor, for example. Not my current editor, but editors of the past.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's really apparent in what you choose to write about and kind of the parallels that we see in Mickey's story. And you know, on the subject of asserting your point of view, I want to talk about the essay that you just published for The Cut. It's a really striking piece about the double standards that Black women experience and navigate in the workplace. And there were so many lines that stood out to me. And there was one in particular where you write:
"My ambition was cloaked aa representation, as doing something for the collective good."
Obviously, it's taxing to navigate your own ambition while balancing or rejecting collective or outside expectations about what you're supposed to want and who you're supposed to be—and so I'd love to talk about that word a little bit. How would you describe your relationship with ambition, and how has it evolved after writing Homebodies?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think that when I got to New York Magazine, I was so impressed by everybody in everything. I was like, this is the best place in the world; there's nowhere else I'd rather be; this is my last job in media. I just want to live here forever. I'm obsessed with this place. I wouldn't so much say that my sentiments have changed as much as they've evolved because I recognized at some point that I didn't want to climb to the top of that ladder. And before getting there, I was very much so in that mindset.
Because prior to that, I was the beauty editor at Nylon, and there I was, like, okay, beauty editor, then senior beauty editor, and then beauty director. I was always thinking, oh my gosh, the number of beauty directors who have also ended up becoming the Editor-in-Chief of X, Y, and Z magazine. I very much so had that hope for myself. I thought that I wanted that power. I wanted the opportunity to tell stories and shape them and decide the direction and push culture in the direction that I saw fit. That was a big want of mine, and I felt I was capable of doing that. And so I was like, this is what I want to do, this is what I can do, this is what I should be doing.
Then the pandemic happened, and I knew I wanted to continue to write. I knew I wanted to write fiction; that had always been a dream of mine, but that felt like a kind of bigger thing in a way. It just felt overwhelming to me because I was like, how do you even write a book? That's a lot of words! I used to write a lot of fanfiction when I was in high school—
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, I love that! [Fanfiction] About what? Sorry to detour.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: The Clique. [Laughs] I wrote a lot of Clique fan fiction, which was just my outlet. I would just write so much—I could write 10,000 words in a day, which is crazy me. Now imagine. No, absolutely not. [Writing] 10,000 words in a day sounds insane to me. But that would be something I couldeasily just sit down and pump out. I would sit down at 10:00 PM and write until three and go to sleep. I'm like 15, 16 [years old]. That's what I would spend my days doing: writing. But then I got to this point where I could no longer write these long-form thoughts anymore. And so I was just kind of going through an identity crisis with my fiction and an identity crisis with my writing, and in all of that time, I started becoming a professional and doing this beauty thing and being like, oh, I really like this.
But returning to that practice—committing myself to Homebodies—really changed my relationship to ambition because it became so much more vulnerable. Not to say that putting yourself out there in your career and doing that isn't vulnerable because, in a lot of ways, it is. But fiction, novel writing, and writing, in general, is just such a vulnerable practice. At the end of the day, an article goes up; it comes down; an article goes up, people like it, the conversation changes, it evolves. The attention span for articles is much different than the attention span for a book or also just the time you dedicate to it. I was like: I want this so much for myself. I want to do this so badly. I'd never given so much of myself over to something.
Rachel Schwartzmann: And it felt like the right time?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah. I mean, with the pandemic also ... I had all this time that I wasn't commuting. I could kind of give myself over to something else, I could actually focus, and I actually had the brain space to do something other than get up and go to work and write a story and come home. [Laughs]
So as far as ambition goes, Homebodies changed for me, I think, what I wanted—not only out of my industry but also what I wanted for myself. Because I was able to recognize that this is really what I want to be doing, this is really what I care about. While I still have big ambitions in the fiction space, in the book space—I think I'm just naturally a very ambitious person. I want the biggest, best version of everything—I learned to have this appreciation for the craft that superseded what everybody else could see in some ways. And the ambition became on a much more personal level. It changed from just outside validation or from things that people could see to someone reading my work and feeling seen or someone reading my work and being like, that was a beautiful sentence. Someone reading my work and being like, wow, how the hell did she do that? It's a different kind of ambition, I would say.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think I just crossed that threshold myself. It's a relieving spot to get to in a lot of ways. Kind of reorients your focus on the things that are more important and have longevity—because a job title changes, a trend changes—those things [you mentioned] become part of somebody's foundation. So I'm glad that you've arrived at that point and that it feels right.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Very different. Very different.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, on the subject of ambition, I want our listeners to meet Mickey. So maybe now we can have you read a section from Homebodies.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Sure. So where we are in the book at this point is Mickey and Lex have just fought, and she decides that she's going to leave and go home to Maryland. And this is kind of a big decision for her to be making cause she hasn't been home in a while. Her relationship to home is complex because she's thrown herself into her work, and that's mostly where her identity is centered. And so her deciding to go home and leave the safety and comfort of what she's built is a massive decision. The next part that I'm reading is her contending with that choice.
PASSAGE READ BY TEMBE DENTON-HURST ︎ PURCHASE HOMEBODIES ︎︎︎
︎
I'm wondering what are some things that you had to force yourself not to turn away from as you were writing her stories?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: What is interesting, and I think that what my editor really pushed for, was just more emotion into Mickey in a sense. ... not that Mickey felt emotionless, but she didn't want me to run away from all of the feelings that Mickey was feeling. She was like, well, how did she feel at this moment? What is her reaction? There would be certain moments where Mickey wouldn't react when I first wrote it, and she was like, how did she react to this? How does she feel about this? What would she say?
Choosing not to turn away from Mickey, and instead, the book essentially being all about her interiority and everything that she's going through and everything that she's feeling and all the things that she's experiencing, it was intense because we spend so much time, even though it's in the third person, it's as close to close third, I think as one can get.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You're in the room with her.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Exactly. She's crying; you're seeing the tears fall from her face. We are up underneath her the whole time. And so it was difficult at times not to turn away from her pain. It was very intense.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, in The Cut essay, it was interesting; towards the end, I think you said you "gave her a soft place to land and let her fall apart."
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think the way that she fell apart—that is the story; it's the humanity. So I thought that it was really interesting that we kind of got to see her move towards resolutions in some ways, and then others make the same mistakes. But honesty was really pulsing throughout [the book]. And I think the vulnerability was a matter of separating your experiences from Mickey's and letting her feel things. How is it treading that boundary?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think it was understanding that what I would do in a situation is not what Mickey would've done in a situation. [Laughs] I would not make the same choices that she makes. But that's just her. That's just life. That's just real. ... I'm sure there are going to be some readers who come to the page hoping that she's going to move one way and she moves the other. But I think that that's just reality. [Laughs] I'm a big offender of reading with my Goodreads reviews, both the good and the bad. And some of the criticism I've seen that has come up a few times is they're like, oh, Mickey has these voices of reason, and she doesn't listen to them, and her grandmother gives her such good advice. She could be making different choices, and she just doesn't. That's so frustrating. And I'm like, yeah, but that's real. There are a lot of people who have great advice. I am the advice giver of my friend group. I cannot tell you how many times I've told them to go right, and they go left.
Ultimately people have their own motivations, and my goal was to kind of make Mickey's motivations plain on the page. Growing is hard, and it's not always in the most obvious ways or in the big moments. A lot of times, it's in the small [moments], and Mickey grows from the beginning of the book to the end—even if there's no fanfare and she doesn't run up a mountain and be like, yes, I am different, I am changed. Look at me. I am a different person now. You know? So I hold to a different kind of standard in a sense, which is what I essentially explore in the essay in some ways. But holding myself to a standard or this idea of having to be morally sound or perfect or all of those things ... I didn't want to give to Mickey. I didn't want her to have that. It's kept me safe in a lot of ways, but it's also trapped me in others. And so I wanted her to be able to explore things unburdened by a certain level of self-awareness.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's interesting to take on that challenge because Mickey's interiority is so strong, and we really see her kind of pulling from the past, trying to make informed decisions about the present.
Just going back to something you said about growth happening in the small moments: I was particularly moved by how you showed her anxiety and the physicality of your writing. Early in the book, as Mickey is building to this point where she's going to be fired from her job, we see her anxiety perk up in small but familiar ways, like her hands shaking and just the little kind of nuances that you write for each of the characters. I mean, there are so many examples, but what were some interesting things about writing the body and the mind?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I wanted it to feel very intertwined for her and to just have it be real. I just wanted to explore the way that these things show up in real life. I mean, her anxiety is something I have actually experienced. I remember how anxious I used to be. Sometimes I would be at work, especially when I was younger and just starting out, wanting to do everything right and wanting it to be perfect and knowing that the mind can control the body in a lot of ways. And for me, it has to be physical. I just want to tell the truth. That's always my goal in my writing. Obviously, I'm writing fiction, but I want to tell the truth. And so, in truth-telling, I'm trying not to shy away from the different aspects of things. And I realize a little bit too that... I don't know if it's about overwriting. I don't know if overwriting ... I don't know how to say this. There's—
Rachel Schwartzmann: No excess.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah, I try not to overwrite. In my mind, I realize I write a little bit of a shorthand in a sense. If you've experienced it, it'll be very clear to you what I'm talking about. I don't know if that makes sense.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I think you kind of hold up a mirror in moments that Mickey's experiencing. It feels like you're giving the reader credit.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah, I don't want to overexplain anything. And so you said there are nuances and things feel specific, and that's also because every character has their own specific things. And so for Mickey ... this is just her experience and true to the way that she exists in the world, in her life. And so I try to also give her a level of specificity that's unmistakable and really feels like it belongs to her on the page.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, it's no easy feat. Readers will have a lot to kind of burst through when they're getting to know Mickey and her experiences. But generally, zooming out a little bit, talking about truth-telling, I wonder about the relationship between truth-telling and pace and what fiction can teach us about those things that other forms can't.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think that when it comes to pace, especially, you have to make some decisions about what kind of story you're going to tell. If it's a conversation around growth and healing and all of that type of stuff, those things don't happen overnight. And so because I'm showing a very specific sliver of Mickey's life—it's like six weeks—only so much can happen. So the pace of that, I want it to be true to that. As far as how far she has come in that timeframe. I think it'd be easy for her to be like, I'm going to clean up my whole life, and I'm going to do this thing, and here's step one, step two, step three, step four, I'm going make all these drastic changes, and on the other side, I'm going to be this different person. That can't happen in six weeks as much as we want it to. As much as we want things to change completely overnight, in so many cases, that is not how it happens.
In this book, I wanted to really plant a seed—plant a seed of possibility for something more, something different, and just show the reality of what it looks like to try to find yourself and put yourself back together. And in extending her world, I was like, the only way I can do that is by looking backward in some ways. I knew I wasn't going to play with the future. Let's look backward and kind of fill in some of the ways that she moves in the world and shows up in the world by showing where she came from.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I loved that it swiveled out beyond work and really got into her intimate relationships, her familial relationships. Was there any one area of her life that you wish you had expanded upon more?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Maybe I would've loved to expand the love story even more. I was telling my friends recently I just want to write a Romance novel next. I love writing about love. That's my favorite thing to write about.
And more [about] the friendships. I just, I dunno, I love Mickey's world. When I look at it, I'm like, oh, I could have written about this. I could have written about that. I could have added this in. I could have added that in. But I think it's fine as it is. But there are a lot of different directions that it could have gone, I think. If I wrote in any other direction, it would've been a different book, [which] I recognize as well.
Rachel Schwartzmann: There could be a sequel!
Tembe Denton-Hurst: [Laughs] People have been asking ... what's Homebodies part two? I could have continued to look at media. I could have written a whole—I could have written three books about Blackness in media and just kept her in New York and had her fighting the good fight, you know, very Devil Wears Prada in a sense: She works, here are her things, here's the tumultuousness, she's striving for the job. I could have done that. I have quick, witty quips about the state of media and all of its bullshit for days. I could do that all day. But I really wanted to just explore the life of one Black writer who really wants this really bad, but you know, is a person at the same time and is dealing with all this other stuff and allowed work to consume so much of her life that all that other stuff kind of got left behind an now she has to deal with it all. That was really what I was committed to. It's more about this happens to be her job, and this happens to be her circumstance versus this is the point. I wasn't necessarily trying to make a point about that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. I think, on that note, maybe we can have you read another section from Homebodies, specifically from Chapter 18.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Okay.Rachel Schwartzmann: How does it feel to be [at] home with this book coming out and kind of revisiting some of these themes?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Well, I'm only home for a week. [Laughs] I'm just visiting. I'm still in New York. But it's interesting to come back here because it is actually my intention to move home. So that, I think, is a different thing in and of itself. My goal is to be back here. I think the pandemic changed for me what mattered in some ways.
I'm originally from New York and lived there till I was 13. My dad has always lived here; my mom's always lived in New York. So it was always back and forth for me from when I was little. It would be long weekends, holidays, birthdays, Christmas, and things like that were always in DC. So I feel like I grew up here just as much as I grew up in New York. And then we moved here when I was 13. My parents decided to get back together, which was a choice.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's amazing.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Very short-lived. Very short-lived. But they tried. And so that happened. I was here for like all of high school. Then I moved back to New York for college, and I've been in New York for the past ten years since then. And so it's cool, it's like coming home. But again, as much as I love New York and I don't think I'll ever leave it, really, it's always been my home. It's just... one side of my grandparents is down here. My little sister, who's four years old, is down here. So I want to be here for her soccer games, and I want to be able to eat dinner with my grandparents on a Sunday. I want a house and not an apartment. [Laughs] So I think my desires are just changing as I'm getting older.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I think we all owe it to ourselves not to block our own shot in a sense.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Mm-hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I actually grew up here, too, in Queens.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Where?
Rachel Schwartzmann: All over: Forest Hills, Rego Park, Astoria. So I was like, oh, I'm happy to see Astoria here [in the book]. [Laughs]
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I'm in Woodside now.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Okay, great. Yeah, I mean, I haven't been back in a while. My parents don't live here anymore, so I kind of lost the tether to that part of my life. But New York's an interesting one. Lately, for me, it's been feeling less like home and just more familiar, and I don't always know if those things are the same.
I've also been going through something where I've really retreated in the last year, and I'm not sure if it has something to do with writing a book and just needing to kind of isolate. But yeah, it's interesting to build a smaller life in a city that's always demanding more of you.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I feel like I went through something very similar when I was writing, where my world became very small, and I just got very obsessed with my own routine. People did not see me often. I feel like I still live a small life in New York in a lot of ways, even though I go to events for work and I hang out with friends. I'm not out all the time. I am home a lot in my little space, a lot with my family a lot and I love that. It's nice. I just enjoy it. But yeah, New York, in some ways, does make that challenging, if only because everyone else is living what seems to be the busiest, most full life ever alongside you simultaneously. And so it is very different, and I think I love the flexibility of being able to say like, oh, I want to go to some crazy restaurant today, or I want to go to this beautiful museum tomorrow. And I think that when you're in a smaller town, or somewhere that's a little bit less fast-paced, it's sometimes more difficult to do that. But there's something nice about the quiet, too.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's essential for me. I'm super introverted, so it's kind of funny that I've been here for as long as I have. [Laughs] But opposites attract, right?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: For sure.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think just on the note of living in New York and the "expectations" of making the most of it here, something that you also explore in Homebodies is the role of social media in some ways and the performative elements of just being young and trying to stake your claim. And I'm curious [to hear] what you've learned about boundaries.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: When it comes to boundaries online, I feel like I've always had a very clear sense of what I was going to do on the internet and what I wasn't going to do on the internet because I had a teacher in high school who scared all of us about the kinds of things that we should be doing. They were like, colleges are looking at [this] ... you guys [have] a drink in your hand, that's inappropriate. That kind of thing. And so, as a result, I've continued to adhere to a lot of those standards since. There are no photos of me with my middle finger up; I was like, what if I ever wanted to be president? They would be like, oh, this girl has her middle finger up? Absolutely canceled. [Laughs] So there's all of these random things that I'm not going to do.
I just think also social media is not my place to go and be vulnerable. Some people feel comfortable doing that, but to me, true vulnerability is dangerous in the hands of strangers. I think that that's something I reserve for people who love me, and these people on the internet don't love me even if they think they do. It's like a projection of myself. And it's not that it's inauthentic cause I don't curate things like, oh, I want people to see me a certain kind of way. It's not intentional in that way, but it is a curation. I don't necessarily post when I'm having a bad day on the internet. I don't find that to be helpful for me personally. I just don't find it to be a helpful exercise. So my emotional space is very, very far away from the internet.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, that's rare in a culture of reactivity. [Laughs]
Tembe Denton-Hurst: People are crying on the internet, and I'm like, I love that for y'all, but I just can't.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Save it for the page and for the people. I think to your point of reserving honest, special parts of yourself [that] is really apparent in the book. And this is kind of something I've picked up over the years before I start a book, l like to read the Acknowledgements [section] first. I'd love to talk about some of the people and your acknowledgments. Who has encouraged you to—like Mickey—move on from situations or ideals that were no longer serving you or who's just made you better?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Everyone. A lot of the people who are named are my friends, and they are my family in a lot of ways, too, and they've all done that. I think that what's great about them is I can bring the worst thing that I feel, and their response is not to run away from that but to support me and love me through it. Remind me of who I am on days when I don't recognize myself or on days when I don't see myself in the way that they see me.
I couldn't have finished this in some ways without them because they're just like, you got this. Even when I was like, I need to finish this; I need to work on this, they're like, okay, we're not calling you for two weeks. [Laughs] They're like, we're leaving you alone. We're not going to call you. And when I would call them, they would still answer the phone and talk to me even when I was supposed to be editing.
These have been my people, and there are people who aren't on that acknowledgment page who are also my people, and they're my community. Every single one of them has really shaped me and made me who I am. And so ... I couldn't have my first book come out and not say thank you to them.
Rachel Schwartzmann: What do you think they learned about you through this book that they didn't know before?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: A few of my friends said that they didn't know I was funny. Well, one of my friends Madison, in particular, was like, I didn't know you were funny in your writing. A lot of people have said to me, too, that Homebodies is kind of a funny book. There are moments that made them laugh, and that's so interesting to me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, the dialogue is so rich, and I think for as much humor as there is, there's also a lot of depth and a lot of reckoning within Mickey's relationships. And I just want to quickly touch on the mother-daughter aspects of the story because we see a lot of things at play. We see the strain between Mickey and her own mother; the unspoken tensions between Lex and Elda. And we also see Mickey's longtime friend Jasmine as she mothers her daughter Nova and then there's Grandma Anna, who is amazing and a matriarch in the family. There are moments when motherhood is weaponized and when Mickey realizes that "they had spent much of their relationship mothering each other, filling the holes that the women who birthed them had left behind." I'd love to hear how you came to each person's relationship and what all of these characters and dynamics taught you about caring for somebody.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah, so for me, I knew that I was always going to write a book about lesbian women. That was always going to be important to me because, as a lesbian woman, I was like, I want to write about what I know about, and that's what I know about. But on a more ideological level, I think what's really compelling to me about women loving women is there's this idea of nurturing that is always kind of tossed about as like this one of these essential qualities of being a woman. Which I think is not true—but it's a sociological truth in some ways nonetheless. Like it's something that's always like put forth as this way that women just naturally are, which we know is not the case. But at the same time, if we're looking at women as spaces of healing, I want it to explore the richness of all of the interactions that we have and all of the different textures that come with that.
And so, as much as they're caring for each other, they're hurting each other, too. And I really wanted to explore the various ways in which those dynamics exist. Like Jasmine, she and Mickey have this very lighthearted relationship in a sense. She and Mickey obviously have some tension. They're like each other's oldest friends; they're not each other's closest friends in the same way as Scotty, who she clearly feels to be on more level ground with in some ways. So there's tension there. But I think that there is almost a softness that Jasmine has with Mickey that she doesn't really have with her own daughter. Even though she clearly loves Nova, she's constantly disciplining her, and their interactions are mostly her telling her not to do something.
For me, I've seen that kind of motherhood where I'm like, oh, this is my girl. We hang out; she's so fun. And her kids do experience her as fun, but there's always this discipline element that's happening. So I wanted to explore that. And then when it came to Elda ... this overbearing mom who wants all these things for her kids, loves her daughter, wants to give her everything, wants to support her in all of these ways except for one. And so they have this positive relationship, but Lex knows in order for that relationship to be maintained, there are parts of herself that she has to kind of leave behind and hide. And there's that tension and being the person outside of that that caused a lot of anxiety. As far as Mickey's relationship with her own mother, I was really interested in how her mother mothers her from far away and her mother's choice to leave because of the failures of her own mother in a sense. And so that lineage of trauma was really interesting to me.
When you asked me earlier ... was there anything else you would've wanted to write more about? I could have explored that further. And then we have The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, where the book is 800 pages long. [Laughs] And that is like one of my favorite, favorite, favorite books ever. It's just so, so good. But I was like, am I going to write a family epic? Maybe the next book. I was like, maybe the next one. Let's stick to Mickey's six weeks because the relationship between women and their daughters—and especially Black women and their daughters—in as many ways as it is tender and nourishing; it's also heartbreaking and fraught and tense. And so I wanted to kind of—through different relationships—pull at some of those threads and just kind of see what came out.
And it's not always: Mickey had a tense relationship with her mom. Here's why. It's just in everybody's interactions. Jasmine being this young mom— who's also the disciplinarian—is not necessarily always overtly said, but it's in the Nova, don't open that door. Nova, what are you doing, Nova? Don't open your presents. I don't care how you feel. It's in the way she talks to her and the way that she interacts with her, and the way that she kind of responds to her. Those are the things I wanted to kind of show and expose the dynamic via dialogue a lot of times.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it was hard to see Mickey kind of learn the difference between love and care and control and manipulation, particularly with Tee. I think the relationships you draw; there's never really any sort of prescription about how it's supposed to look.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I mean, in some ways ... in all of those relationships, I see parts of those relationships in a lot of relationships that I know or am a part of in real life. [Laughs] So the people in the acknowledgments, I'm like, when y'all read it, they'll be like, ‘hmm, that's interesting.’ I'm like, yeah, y'all probably gave me a little idea or two.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Art imitating life?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Exactly. And I guess it feels real because it is real. And not real like oh, it's my life but real in [that] it's the world that I see around me, and I tried to be faithful to that.
Rachel Schwartzmann: How do you think about legacy? What do you want yours to be?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think about legacy a lot, and not really in relation to myself, but more so in relation to writers. When we think about Toni Morrison, we think about how she's completely reimagined the way that we conceptualize slavery in literature and the trauma of slavery and literature. Think about someone like Zora Neale Hurston and how she's completely transformed the way that we understand dialogue and dialect essentially in literature and the possibilities for that. And respectability, she's done so much for that.
Then we think about, like, for me, the legacy of lesbianism in Black literature and how that's often not explored in some senses or is and like isn't called that. I think about Alice Walker, and I think about The Color Purple and the legacy of that work and Blackness and trauma, and just how a lot of these books that I loved and grew up on are a lot of the books that shaped me, how they've informed my own work and that it'll kind of give people hopefully new ways of seeing themselves or new ways of understanding the world around them. And so yeah, for me, I just hope that people feel seen and that people feel connected and people feel understood, and they feel like I told the truth. That's my hope.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's ongoing work, and I think a lot of that [work] requires asking questions— asking questions to your community, asking questions of yourself. I'm curious if there's a question that you hope people start asking you more often.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I think I want people to ask: How do I see myself? I think that that's always a fun question. I'm in my head a lot, so I like questions that kind of pull me out of that at times and force me to consider myself in a different way. It's a good check-in for myself because I think the answer changes throughout your life.
Rachel Schwartzmann: How do you see yourself at this moment?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: I see myself as someone who is trying and, for the first time doing so in a very vulnerable way. This whole process has been very vulnerable for me. Even [writing] that article is vulnerable for me, and leading with my heart and my emotion and leading with my perspective and my experiences. It's teaching me that there's not only something valuable in it for me, but it's valuable and healing for other people, too.
I had one person reach out to me recently about Homebodies, and she was like, this really made me feel seen. And I've gotten that message a few times. The idea that something that literally came out of my head and I've just been typing away on a computer about has helped people to see themselves more clearly. They feel: I see myself on the page. Those have always been very transformative moments in literature for me. So the idea that I'm doing that for other people is very surreal.
I also see myself as someone who is learning a lot. I think I'm learning a lot about how to be a writer and how to do this and create a practice and do this often and continue to try ... what comes after Homebodies that whole thing that's in some ways scary and exciting, but daunting in some other ways because you start at page one all over again. So that's crazy. But I feel I know myself better than I ever have, but I'm also excited about the parts of myself that I haven't explored yet.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I would agree with that. I feel like I'm someone who's reemerging. I did turn away from a lot of things, and I think part of that was delayed grief from the pandemic and just from the wildness of the last years. But I think it's kind of a constant negotiation of what matters and how I want to show up because I have to show up. [Laughs]
Tembe Denton-Hurst: For sure. And in a lot of ways, I feel like that's what Mickey is doing: reemerging. It's an evolution from the self that she'd become as a result of everything that had happened to her. And it's now time for her to start making some choices. I think there are going to be some people who wish I had focused on the choices that she made, but I think there's something very valuable about the journey to get there.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. I mean, there's so much more that we could talk about in terms of people, writing, [and] reading, but I think to close things out, maybe we can have you read one final passage from Homebodies.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Something funny about what you had me read was that it was the original ending of Homebodies.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Was that an editor's choice?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Yeah, it was my editor's choice and my agent's choice. They were like: you can't leave it here. And I was like, I can't? [Laughs] ... This fade-to-black vibe is still the way that it ends, actually. But this is the way that I initially intended it to end. I wanted her to be considering in a different place. I wanted to write a quiet book. I knew it wasn't going to be pacey and exciting. I'll leave that for later. But yeah, I don't know. I just wanted it to be quiet, so I'm going to read it.
PASSAGE READ BY TEMBE DENTON-HURST ︎ PURCHASE HOMEBODIES ︎︎︎
︎
Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Tembe Denton-Hurst, author of Homebodies. You can purchase Homebodies anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Tembe on social @tembae. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you’ve been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.