TBG Library: "You Get What You Pay For"

Published Mar 15, 2024, 7:00 AM

It’s time to make some space on your bookshelf for a new addition because we’re back with another TBG Library pick. Today’s pick is the debut book of essays by award-winning author Morgan Parker, titled, “You Get What you Pay For.”

Morgan Parker is a poet, novelist, and author of works such as the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collection Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. In You Get What You Pay For, Morgan traces the difficulty and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Morgan joins me today to discuss what it means to experience hypervisibility as a Black woman regardless of class, how as a teenager she advocated for her own mental health with her parents, and the ways in which conversations with her therapist influence her writing, and vice versa. 

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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, doctor Joy hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for a special bonus episode of this Therapy for Black Girls podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a worry from our sponsors.

Hi.

I'm Morgan Parker and I'm on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast and we're in session today. I'm packing my collection of essays you Get What You Pay For.

Hey, y'all, it's time to make some space on your bookshelf because we're back with another edition of TBG Library. Today's pick is the debut book of essays by award winning author Morgan Parker, titled You Get What You Pay for. Morgan is a poet, novelist, and author of work such as the young adult novel Who Put This Song On and the poetry collection Magical Negro, which won the twenty nineteen National Book Critics Circle Award. And You Get What You Pay For. Morgan traces the difficulty and beauty of existing as a black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Morgan joins me today to discuss what it means to experience hyper visibility as a black woman, regardless of class. How as a teenager she advocated for her own mental health with her parents, and the ways in which conversations with her therapists influence her writing and vice versa. If something resonates with you while enjoying our conversation, please share with us on social media using the hashtag TBG in Session or join us over in the Sister Circle. To talk more about the episode. You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls dot com. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Morgan.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

So as you say, let's start at the beginning, I'd love for you to share when did you know that you wanted to write poetry, or even write at all.

I was nine years old when I said I want to be a writer, so it was a long time ago.

At that time, I did not like poetry at all.

I'm a firm believer that we teach poetry completely backwards. It took me until the middle of college until I read poetry that I was like, Oh, it could be this, you know, like it can be about this stuff and it can resonate with me and not be about snowy evenings and men name Longfellow. So I was always interested in writing, but I didn't really know what that meant. I didn't know any published authors or anything like that, so I guess in my head it was just like some vision of me.

Being an older black woman with a blazer and like, you know what I mean, Like, I didn't really know what it meant, but I always wrote.

I have kept journals, and I found that it was something that helped me express myself in a way that I didn't think was being expressed in conversation and in just like how I was expressing myself through my body in my words in person, and so I really found that I was best able to say what I meant if I was writing it, and so that became just like my way of living in the world.

As a kid.

And as I got a little bit older and started sharing things with my friends, it became a way for me to connect with other people, which I always say I write to communicate, and it is about connection. So I found sharing little bits of journals and things like that in middle school and high school, and my friends were saying things like that's exactly how I feel, I just don't know how to put it into those words, and that felt really special to me, and it felt like, well, if that's something that I can do for other folks, to like articulate what people are feeling, that's pretty powerful and it's something.

That I love to do and feel that i'm good at.

It's one of those things where when I'm writing, and even as a kid, when I was writing, it was like, Okay, this is when I'm supposed to be doing. This is where I feel most free to be me, I guess, and where I feel most valuable also to others.

Love then I'm curious. Have you thought about how we should teach poetry to young people so that maybe more of them fall in love with it?

Yeah? Absolutely.

I think there are so many exciting contemporary and young poets right now who are doing incredible work, not just in terms of entertainment, but also on the craft level. And I think about the folks that I teach to graduate students, folks who are writing about everyday things, people who are black and brown, and people who are queer, and people who've had a lot of different lives, a lot of imperfect lives and are.

Willing to talk about it.

I think that's the sort of work that young people need to be able to see and be fed poetry in a way that is more of an offering and less of a challenge to be presented. And honestly, I think that a lot of the older and more traditional and more you know, technically stale work that we look at first, you know, if we're looking at Shakespeare or Kipling or whatever it is, I think we can get a lot more from it seeing how their.

Influence has showed up in this century.

You know, I think there's no problem with starting here and then going backwards instead of starting way back there, you know, and whoever whoever makes it, you know what I mean, gets the treat of exciting poetry at the end.

That seems wrong, right right?

Agreed? Agreed. I appreciate that perspective. So talk to us about what inspired you to write you get what you pay for, and how it might be different from collections of your other work.

Yeah.

Well, it definitely took a lot longer, and I think that had to do with not just the work, but conceptualizing the book as a whole and not just each individual essay.

I've been writing.

Essays in the past for various publications, and I was always frustrated by word count. It felt like I was able to just scratch the surface of a theme or a topic. And so the inspiration behind writing a book of essays was really to see what happens if I had as much space as I need to follow these threads that were interesting to me and a different way of looking at I guess my life. I never intended to write a memoir, but nonfiction is how can I give you a look into my life? What are the narratives around my life so far? And what are the themes that are through lines in it, So thinking about how to wed what my life experiences have been with what are the themes and threads in the world and throughout history that are really compelling to me, and that I want to dig into research and follow every little tiny breadcrumb and how am I going to blend those together and put them in conversation with each other. So a lot of it started when I wrote an essay for The New York Times about how we should have therapy as reparations, and that idea was one that I wanted to follow, and thinking about mental health in general as it relates to race relations and how our psychological health is and has been affected by race relations in America.

And so that essay is just a little piece.

It's like me figuring out what that argument is and laying it out, And in the process of writing the book, the collection of essays, it was about thinking through my experience of mental health. There's an essay for almost every one of my therapists. I always say, the most memoiry part, the parts where it's like you're following me in my life, those are.

All happening in a therapist's office.

So that's just the way that I decided to frame the book here is my life through the lens of the therapist couches that I've been sitting on, I guess, and what are the things that are going on out in the world, and how are they relating to what I'm talking about in the therapist's office.

So that was like the larger.

Conception of it, which there's a different type of storytelling that happens in narrative nonfiction than in poetry. Obviously in poetry there's less of argument making. It's more presenting the images. And I still wanted to do that with essays, but with the book, I did want it to feel as though there was a claim being made and an argument being fought for.

Yeah, so mental health is definitely a large theme throughout a lot of this work, and early on you talk about like some of your early symptoms of depression being written as an attitude problem or just the behavior of a regular teenager. I wonder for you, when did a shift that you realize that you actually needed the support of a mental health professional.

I mean, for me, it really was like, oh, I want to die, you know, it.

Really was it's either this or else.

And even though I didn't you know, it was almost like I was like gaslighting myself because I'm like, maybe it's not that bad, and maybe I am just a teenager, and you know, I get it, but really having to get to that point where it's like I'm trying and I can't. There's got to be something outside of me that can help me really getting to that point. I mean, it really was more of a conversation between me and my parents. These conversations were still working on, I will say, but we've gotten a lot better about it, and I can't imagine being put really in their shoes. Also because I think that they didn't even really understand. You know, the first time I said I wanted to go to a therapist, They're like, hmm okay, oh, like what have you been reading sort of thing. So it did take a little bit of me just really not letting up on that and trying and really pleading with them to understand that I needed something else. Of course, the problem was that they didn't know what that thing was. It wasn't like, oh, I'll just call my therapy, you know what I mean. So I think it presented a little bit more of a challenge. It was easier to kind of avoid because no one knew what to do, no one knew what that meant, like what are the steps even to take? So yeah, for me, it really was like, I know that I feel bad, I know I have felt bad. I'm thinking about the things in my life that are making me feel bad and it's not adding up. It feels bigger than me, and it feels bigger than my middle school friend not hanging out with me anymore.

And yeah, I mean it's not something that I.

Had a model for, but obviously have reread Sylvia Plath and all these other New England white women, and they seemed to be in therapy, you know, that seemed to be a tool that were using, So why not me? And yeah, I think it was hard because it was hard for all of us to conceptualize that just talking about my problems would help anything, you know what I mean. I think there wasn't really an understanding of what the therapeutic process is. And again that's something that I'm still getting my folks to understand all these years later. So it really was a blind spot in our family and in our community.

It's a big thing for a fifteen year old to have to do.

I feel lucky that I am so stubborn and was able to advocate for myself because a lot of teens don't or don't know what to say or what to do. But I do feel like there was something in me that knew I don't have to live like this, and it feels a little early for me to just bow out, you know.

So that really was where we were.

And I wondered, kind of looking back on your own experience, Morgan, if there's advice you have for teens about how they can advocate for themselves and their mental health.

Yeah, I think just be open about it and be honest with themselves. I think where I got into trouble was doubting myself and thinking, oh, it's not that bad, maybe I'll feel better tomorrow, you know. I mean you can only think that for how many tomorrows. So I think believing that my problems were real really gave me more confidence and to not shy away from really saying how I felt.

It was hard, you know.

I think parents and black parents who don't have experience with therapy especially have this way of internalizing it as I am a failure because you're not happy, And I think that that can stop us as young people. A lot of the time, you don't want to hurt your parents feelings. You don't want to make them feel bad. So I would just encourage them to honor how they're feeling and be honest about that. I think for me, a lot of it was that my parents didn't know exactly how bad I felt because I didn't want to tell them and it's hard to say it out loud.

Yeah. Yeah, that is, especially like you said at that age. Mm hmmm. Yeah. So I'm curious, Morgan, how would you say your writing has been informed by your experience of being in therapy and then vice versa. I'm curious to hear how much of your experience and your identity as a writer actually shows up in therapy. Can you talk to us about that.

Yeah, it's so intertwined at this point, and I'm really grateful that's something that my therapists are interested in and helping me with. We talk a lot about my career in therapy. I mean, that's my life, right and a lot of this work requires me to have a certain level of self understanding and self knowledge.

And self forgiveness.

You know, a writing requires a lot of grace with the self, and so a lot of the time, the tools that we're talking about developing for me to move through the world are the same tools that are going to help.

Me in my writing process.

And a lot of it is talking about, you know, how am I going to be prepared to go on tour and how am I going to protect myself when I'm really trying to be vulnerable in the writing.

So there's a lot of discussion of that.

I will also say that I could not have written this book, my last book, the one before that, I could not have written any of them without being in therapy. And often I'll write something and be like, Okay, this is what we'll talk about in therapy. You know, there were a lot of poems in my last poetry book, Magical Negro, where I would write a draft and look at it and think, oh, okay, well, I need two more therapy sessions before I can finish this poem. Now that I know that the poem's doing that, I'm not yet in place where I can go there. And that sort of navigation has been incredibly important to my writing process. I think when I was first starting out, it was like, whoa, this is where the poem's going I'm going there, and then maybe I'm just like totally shredded at the end. So it has been helpful for me to notice where they can help each other, where I can talk through some things in therapy that will help me feel safer writing about them in poetry, and where I can spill some of my unconscious in poetry and have that inform future therapy sessions. I mean, it's all very interconnected, right, and it's I think the more that I'm able to acknowledge that and harness it, the stronger not only my writing about depression, but just my writing about myself has been.

I wonder if there are poems that you've written and you realize where it's taking you and you realize, oh, I don't know that this needs to be public, right, Like this may be something that I all talk about with my therapists, Like how do you make the decisions between which ones get shared with the public and which ones you keep privately?

Yeah, that all happens in the editing process, for sure. I think all drafts at first are like, we'll see if this gets shown to people. And I think there's two parts of the process. There's the part where I'm expressing something, and then there's the part where the poem is expressing itself. Right, So sometimes it's just for me to express myself and the poem doesn't live on its own for other folks, you know what I mean. I think it's really about what is being expressed. Is it just me working through something? Or am I saying something larger that other folks can grasp onto while speaking about myself?

I guess ass. It's nice to see you're still with this. What do you think about the conversation so far? Did anything come to mind for you? Or maybe you're just listening and learning That works too. If you're enjoying this week's episode, be sure to circle back next week. Here's a preview of our conversation on starting a career after fifty with jenn Is.

Suddenly can tell by my accent, I'm English born, but I moved to the Caribbean from a successful career to have a different life, and that life seemed to ramp up, so I made the decision I was done in my fifties, rapidly approaching my sixties now and decided this wasn't the life I'd signed up for. So it's time to make a change, and if I don't do it, something else will.

So is there anything that happened, because it feels like, you know, many of us have these like a how moments, or like something happens and we're like, I need to make some changes or my values are not quite an alignment. Was there any specific thing that led to this piod?

There was definitely a values challenge because at the time we were going through a major restructuring and I looked at where the organization was going and realized that's not where I want to be going in my career. In fact, when I moved to the Caribbean, I'd already decided that had reached the peak of my career. I didn't intend to be c sweet. I never came to do this job. I came to have a step down, but I found myself being rapped up to even more work. I then start experiencing my second what I can recall, my second bout of burnout, and my body was telling me that this isn't going to work, This is not working for you. You need to do something.

Has your body ever told you it was time to make a change. If you want to find out what Jane is dere to transform her life. Be sure to tune in next Wednesday. So in this collection, the first entry year started at the beginning, like we mentioned before, and this is an overview of your upbringing in the social and political events that influence did you also referenced Laura Neil Hurston's quote, I remember the very day that I became colored. Can you talk about some of your earliest experiences related to race and how they continued to shape you today.

Yeah.

I grew up, I mean, in a black family, but in a very white community, and I went to a private, very white Christian school that was fairly evangelical. So I was the outsider from the beginning in a lot of different ways. And this is before I started wearing blazers, so then it was like full outsider. But my relationship to myself and my blackness, I think was so complicated because it was such a time in the early nineties of not seeing color again, this sort of gaslighting thing of like I feel something is different about me, but y'all are saying there's no different, you know what I mean. So I think that really had an effect on how I was able to access my own identity I guess how I felt allowed to. There's something about not wanting to be the one that stands out, but also being aware that you do. You can look at the pictures of my class, my six rade class, and I'm just like a little brown spot right there, so you can't tell someone you're.

Just the same.

And then you see that picture and obviously one of these is not like the others. So I do think there's a little bit of me having to deal with my difference on my own, if that makes sense, and understanding what that meant, but not really being able to talk about it in my social life. Some with my parents and all of that, but I didn't, you know, with my friends at school.

There was always this.

Unspoken navigation of my identity. I think either that or it had to be some kind of a joke. However I could make it non threatening.

I guess.

And how would you say that has shown up for you later in life? At what point do you feel like you were able to have more open conversations about who you were as a black woman in the world.

Yeah, I mean a little bit later in high school, but certainly college. I moved to New York, so I was living in New York City context is key, So living around a lot more black folks made me feel freer to exist as a black person. Yeah, I mean, I think it took me almost exercising myself from a situation in order to be able to access all the parts of myself with pleasure and without feeling like a trespass of some kind. But yeah, I think for that reason, I am very attuned to the other things about myself that are different or the same, And writing is part of this. I think being a writer was kind of part of my identity in high school, and being the writer is different than being the black girl, if.

That makes sense.

I think there's a way that we find our identities underneath the identity because we're forced to. So for me, I became, i think, more secure in the other parts of myself that were different the Doc Martin wearing blazer, wearing weirdo writer. I think I was more comfortable with standing out and I think I still am for those reasons. And yeah, I think that that has affected my ability to just.

Like embrace who I am in a lot of ways because I had to.

I guess I had to in the absence of being able to embrace the fullness of myself.

You've mentioned this blazer several times, and I'm curious to know whether that still is a major part of like your identity as a writer, and like, where are you finding your fabulous blazers.

Still just full big part of my personality is the blazer. Yeah, I picked a couple from J Crew for the tour, but I get a lot at thrift stores. That's always been where I get a lot of good blazers.

I like a good.

Print, I like a nice hounds tooth. You know, a good corduroy blazer. But it's great, I think to latch onto those parts of yourself that are through lines that you're like, you know what. This is something where I feel like myself, I feel comfortable, And I think as I've gotten older, it's been important to find those things that even when I was nine, I liked this, And what are those things that can always remind me who I am because I think the world can confuse it sometimes.

Yeah, I was gonna say it sounds like it was important to you very early on in life, right, like as it shaped your identity of who a poet is, and is something that has kind of grown with you, which I think is very cool. So one of your other essays, watch Her Rise and Rain. It explores the perceptions of black womanhood and the prize and perils of being a highly visible black woman. You share this through the lens of Serena william though I think this kind of applies to lots of different black women. Can you talk to us a little bit about that piece and why you specifically chose the lens of Serena Williams.

Yeah, well, I originally wrote that piece for ESPN, and I am not a sports person, but I was excited to take that assignmix. I was like, my dad's going to be so excited. And because I love Serena. I mean, she's Serena. She's more than an athlete. So I was interested in writing about her obviously because I'm interested in writing about black womanhood, and I was interested to see what would happen if I wrote about sports, Like what through lines could I find? What connections could I find? You know, all writers know that sports is like the greatest metaphors.

Why not me?

Why couldn't I use it? It's kind of funny. My agent had gotten a lot of requests from me. I guess that like Black History Month or whatever to write about like my hair, and I just was like, very like, I'm never gonna write about my hair, like you know what.

To end this white guy. But I was like, you know, I went to say to these people.

And in that essay I ended up talking about braids and seeing the Serena and Venus and their braids and that giving me comfort wheneveryone was making fun of my braids at my school and it just was hilarious. On My agent was like, how do you get Morgan to talk about her hair?

Ask her to talk about sports. You know, we'll come around to it in that way.

But I was so excited like the different themes that came up in that where it was like, all right, let's see how to talk about this tennis player. But really it just brought me back to seeing her on TV, seeing her, you know, those beads in her braids, and feeling a sort of affirmation from that.

So that became the seed of that essay of here's.

This woman I don't know personally, but she's in the world, and her being in the world makes it possible for me to be in the world. So that became the framing for the essay of our lives as paralleled. And I do think that black women were connected to each other, and our fates are connected to each other, and our success is connected to each other. So it was a way to talk about that by just using the example of just me and Serena, but really thinking about, yeah, what are the challenges that we face, and we face them in.

Distinct but similar ways.

You know, no matter who you are, what your career is, how many people are looking at you, we are all sharing those experiences of being alienated and being undervalued.

Or overhyped or whatever it is.

We have a lot of shared experiences in terms of how we're being perceived.

By the world.

It's easy for us to separate like celebrity from regular but when it comes to black women, I mean, maybe that's just not useful. And that was part of what I was trying to do with their more beautiful things Beyonce as well, a more of a leveling of playing field of like, we're all dealing with these things, no matter one stature or money or fame, I mean, and it's it's wild to think, you know, well, she has all this and they're still saying that stuff about her. So it was a little bit of that of like, wow, we all stand on the same ground to America, right, so what does it look like when we stand on the same ground to each other?

Morgan? Are there other pieces that you've been able to write that weren't quite your beat so to speak? Like, Oh, an esp and angle wouldn't have been one you naturally would have maybe pitched, but it came out to me glorious. Others you can think of that you feel like really helped bring your writing to life.

Yeah, you know, assignments are really helpful because it really puts you outside of yourself. There's another essay in the book that started as a piece for an anthology that celebrating one hundred years of the ACLU. And so there are a bunch of different cases that the ACLU intervened in and I had to pick one, and I picked one about this Christian university that I had never.

Heard of before. And it was my be for sure.

But it was a weird way to enter to enter talking about myself and my relationship to white Christianity.

It was interesting that it was the school I'd never heard of. The story was.

That they had these very racist emissions policies where black people weren't allowed to.

Be admitted, and then it was like only.

Married black people could if they're married to another black person, and like no single black people. And this is like late seventies when I say that single black person could come, but only if they'd never been in an interracial relationship or didn't advocate for so very strange things like that. That stuff was in the school's policy until the year two thousand and I ended up finding this sermon by the school's founder that was given in nineteen sixty and just went in and decided to you know, I whipped out my Bible versus that I had not looked at for a while and was like, no, I know that I'm arguing with him. So that was something where I didn't really expect to go into it that way, but that's what happened, and it was fruitful. But it was also like, Wow, all of this stuff is very interconnected me feeling lonely and desirable at times in my life. It was hard to not find links there. Thinking about a white Christian institution that saw interracial dating and interracial sex as so dangerous. Those are things that were in the back of my mind as a child, but I didn't know that. So I think there was a lot of that where I didn't expect myself to be reflecting so much on the messaging that I heard as a child in school, from like elementary school and chapels and all of that. I had been excited to write about Christianity in the Civil Rights era in general, but was surprised to find that, you know, part of it. I ended up writing about immigration, and ended up writing about the Republican Party, and it all really kind of one thing leads to another, and I found that anytime I was looking into the past, that's what happened.

Anytime I'm looking at history.

I found that I was writing about the present, or if I was writing about the present, turned out I was writing about history. So there were a few different essays where it kind of was like, this is way off the rails of where I thought I was going.

The train is still moving, I guess, and that was exciting but also overwhelming.

More from our conversation after the break, So you also write about terms like black girl magic and black excellence, and while those things can be celebratory, it feels like there's also the potential for harm. Can you talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah, everything depends on who's saying it, right and why. I think sometimes it's one thing if we're saying that to each other.

It's another thing if it's a corporate logo. You know what I mean? What are the motivations behind saying that?

I worry sometimes that we get these sorts of hollow affirmation in order to make us be quiet and to say that's excellence. So, yes, that's good, that's enough, Sit down now, you know. So I worry a little bit about that. I rebel against someone not black defining black excellence.

That is something.

And the other thing, to go back to my book Magical Negro and part of why I titled it that and thinking about the black girl magic is obviously there's a danger to that, right, there's a way that our humanity is undercut if we're magic.

That's how Roni King got beied.

You know, if you're a magical hulk, then you can't feel pain. So I think a lot of those dangers are embedded in it, depending on who's saying it. We as black girls know our magic is our humanity, but do other folks know that and so for me, there's a little bit of that where I'm like, it's not magic. I'm just I'm really tired, you know what I mean, It's not magic. And so I bulk a little bit at that when it's coming from an outside perspective, because it feels like a way to erase effort and pain. And I worry that sometimes our praise of black excellence is an effort to contain black excellence and define it and by defining it, leaving things out totally understanding.

Thank you so much for sharing it. So what would you say are your hopes for the impact of your work on your readers, especially for young black women.

I always answer is permission. That's what I want to give young Black women. Permission to be themselves, speak themselves, to hurt, to cry, to go.

To therapy, you know, to write down what they want.

That's always my goal is just to give other Black women the permission that I don't think I've always had. And then affirmation. I think in this book, I really do want to offer straight up affirmation of I see you and I see your pain and I get it.

Those would be the big ones this book.

I really want it to allow people to have conversations that they haven't had before. I think that is something that this book has the potential to do.

So I'm hoping that that works out.

But really, in particular for young black people, I want them to feel affirmed. I want them to feel encouraged. And yeah, I mean, if a couple of people can go to therapy, that'd be fantastic. If a couple of people break up with their white therapists and get a black one, that's cool too, you know. And even if it's just a matter of I'm not going to use this word anymore, or I'm gonna take an extra beat before I respond in this way, little things like that, I think are really what I'm asking for As an author. I spend a lot of time, I mean five years picking the words that I used in this book, being really intentional about language, and really I think that's what I'm asking my readers to do also, is just to be as considerate about the language that they're using in the world and just know that it makes a difference.

So what would you say you learned about yourself in writing this particular book.

That's a really good question. I feel like I want to text my therapists and ask her.

She might have a better risk for this one.

Yeah, exactly, Oh man, I think I learned that I cannot do it all. I learned that I have to be patient with myself and patient with my words. I was really impatient with myself about this book and went through some really hard times while I was writing it and was so frustrated that I wasn't writing and my doctor was like, you can't.

You know, you cannot do this.

So really learning to be a little bit more patient with myself is kind of the journey of this book, knowing where it isn't safe for me to go at the moment.

You know, I learned a lot.

About how trying to take care of myself in the writing process.

You know, I was writing this through the pandemic. I live alone.

It's just me and me in the past and you know it, Zarina, and so really figuring out when it's just me and I'm the only tools I got, how can I protect myself?

So that was a journey of this book. And in a way, the book is a request that's like I can't do it on my own, and these are all the reasons why, and how can we help each other more because it isn't fair what we ask each other to suffer through and the ways that we don't notice each other and each other's pain. I think I'll know more about this in like three years.

You know, you got to sit with it a little bit.

Yeah, I'm like, I think I'm still learning.

So what are you currently reading, writing and thinking about that you feel like is challenging some of your perspectives.

Well, I'm reading a craft book right now which is bueing everything, like swirling everything in my head. It's called How We Do It, and it's edited by Jericho Brown, and it's a bunch of craft essays by a lot of different types of writers, and they're all taking different perspectives, different themes. There's one towards the beginning by I think Crystal Wilkinson, and she presents all of these prompts for creating characters, and that is really I think, coming from writing nonfiction where I am the character and thinking about future projects, it's really cool to see how a novelist like her develops characters. And I think that's where I am right now and thinking about creating fictional characters or characters for screen, or how do we make fiction human. I guess that's sort of where I am. I do have some like fiction ideas, but for me, it has to start with the characters. So I'm enjoying hearing how other writers talk about developing characters, and I think that's really where my head is right now. Working a little bit on the screen adaptation of my young adult novel Who Put This Song On? So that has been a major challenge because writing for screen has its own rules, and I struggle with the rules, so that's challenge, and then working within the confines of production company and all of their stats about what teenagers want and trying to push against that. I'm feeling the challenge of making a teen movie. But it's about depression in the suburbs, so it's not all the it doesn't have all the hallmarks of a teen movie. So it has been a challenge for me to think about what is the teen movie miss about that? You know, it's they're not going to prom not a lot of it's happening. There's a lot of crying, but how can we still make it feel like a teen movie? Which it has been an interesting challenge, you know, but fun, I mean, depression is pretty funny, so it's doable.

Thank you for sharing that. We will definitely be on the lookout for that screen at teaching.

Yeah.

So where can we stay connected to you? Morgan? What is your website as well as any social media channels you'd like to share and where do we grab a copy of the book.

My website is Morgan hyphen Parker dot com. My instagram is Morgan apples zero and you can find the book out March twelfth, everywhere that you buy your books indie bookstores.

You can order it on bookshop.

And you can read it as a kindlebook and an audiobook perfectly.

Will be sure to include all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, Morgan.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

I'm so glad Morgan was able to join us today to chat about you Get what You paid For. To learn more about her work, or to grab a copy of the book, visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash you Get what you pay for and don't forget to text two of your girls right now and encourage them to check out the episode. If you're looking for a therapists in your area. Check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com slash directory And if you want to continue digging into this topic or just be in community with other sisters, come on over and join us in the Sister Circle. It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frida Lucas alis Ellis and Zaria Taylor. Editing was done by Dennison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me for this special TVG Library episode. We'll be back next Wednesday with our regular episode, Take Good Care, What's

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The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a license 
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