Featured Interview with Minda Honey
Interviewed by Leigh Hopkins
Minda Honey, The Heartbreak Years (Little A, 2023).
FEATURED INTERVIEW
WITH Minda Honey
Leigh Hopkins | SEPT 2023 | Issue 27
Minda Honey’s highly anticipated debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years (Little A, October 2023), was destined to be a bestseller. Her essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Author Kiese Laymon wrote of Honey’s debut: “Minda Honey has created a momentous piece of art, of course, but most importantly, The Heartbreak Years will teach a generation of us what's possible when writing through, to, and beneath the pulpy inside of desire and fear.” The Heartbreak Years debuted as the #1 Bestseller on Amazon in Black & African American Biographies & Memoirs.
The Heartbreak Years opens with Honey’s cross-country move from Louisville to Southern California with her high school boyfriend. After the couple breaks up, Honey stays in California and enters a steamy, frustrating, sometimes perilous dating world that’s nothing like she had hoped for. Honey writes about this time with humor, honesty, and vivid detail — a cinematic, slow-motion panning of the camera; the details of an outfit; the pulse of a club. In many places, the book reads like a sparkling rom-com, but Honey seamlessly weaves her relationship woes with threads of consent culture, police brutality, privilege, and employment discrimination.
One of the first essays I read by Minda Honey was “Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces” (Longreads, 2017), an essay that went instantly viral. Honey’s work is featured in Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic. She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon, a newsletter with nearly 60,000 subscribers. She was the director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University.
Minda and I chatted over Zoom from her home in Louisville, where she was surrounded by bookshelves. This interview has been edited for clarity.
LEIGH HOPKINS: I adored The Heartbreak Years from the opening line: "2008: great year for Obama, trash year for Minda." I laughed out loud when I read that.
MINDA HONEY: I think it does a great job of transporting you to a very specific time and place. I think as long as you're of a certain age, then 2008 has a very distinct set of feelings. There’s the election of Obama, when we were all just brimming with optimism and hope and the new post-racial America that was on the horizon. All of this greatness was happening, but on a personal level, I was having a tough time.
HOPKINS: How did you know you wanted to write about this time in your life?
HONEY: I'm someone who's always been writing. Ever since I was a little kid, as soon as I learned how to type, I was typing up stories about animals having tea parties in the jungle. I was always writing, always reading. Then when I was an undergrad, a really mean writing professor said some not very nice things to me, so I stopped writing fiction. But one of the helpful things that I learned in that class was from a fellow student, that you don't have to write fiction, you don't have to be famous to write a memoir and to write about your life. And I was like, oh, okay, I can stop writing these thinly-veiled short stories and just write the real thing. Somebody asked me, why a dating memoir? That's the material I had, you know, I wasn't a president, so I couldn't write a political memoir. I went on a bunch of dates, so that was the material that I had! Actually, the original title for the book was An Anthology of Assholes.
HOPKINS: I'd totally buy that book!
HONEY: Yeah, that's what people said, just based on the title alone. One of the things that I wanted to say in this book is yeah, I went out with a lot of assholes, but sometimes I was an asshole, too. So the book looks at this era of life when we're all just a little bit selfish, when we're all trying to figure out who we are, what we're owed from each other, what we owe other people.
Minda Honey, photograph courtesy of the author.
HOPKINS: One of the first pieces I read by you was in Longreads in 2017, “Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces,” an essay about a vacation you took to visit some of the national parks, something you planned as a kind detox from your MFA program. What ended up happening was something completely different.
HONEY: The funny thing about that essay was that it went so viral. Suddenly there were weird park ranger men in the middle of nowhere sending me messages, like, "Come stay in my cabin. I'll show you racism." I got so many messages like that. Then everybody wants you to write the next great outdoor essay collection. I was like, "Listen, I was driving through the parks. I was not hiking, I have weak ankles. But actually, I'm working on these dating essays!"
HOPKINS: How did the structure of your book evolve?
HONEY: The structure of the book was one of the things I really wrestled with. Ultimately, the book is the arc of a breakup. It opens with the election of Obama and it ends with the unjust murder of Trayvon Martin. When the Obama era ended for me, that marked a significant change in my understanding of my place in this country.
HOPKINS: Kiese Laymon has been a champion of your book. I keep this quote from him on the cork board behind my desk: "There's a way to write a book that doesn't leave you ashamed and scared and alone. I didn't write mine that way. I know a lot of y'all are creating art right now. Please build heart work into your practice ... artfully tearing your heart open and selling that heartful rendering to the highest corporate bidder has consequences … we all deserve to have healthy hearts." How did you care for your heart as you wrote this book?
HONEY: I've heard Kiese speak on this topic. I took a workshop with him at VONA a year or two before Heavy came out. At the time, he was really wrestling with that book, trying to decide what to include and what not to include and what part of his stories and other people's stories overlap and what wouldn't be okay to tell. As writers, we torment ourselves with these questions, but we can't really know until we write the thing, and then that changes from draft to draft. I think the important thing is to check in with yourself at each of those stages. There was an essay that I ended up pulling from the collection at the very last minute that was perhaps one of the best essays I've ever written. The issue with it was that I felt like it was primarily someone else's story that I played a significant role in, but ultimately, to put that story out into the world could have been very disruptive to that person's current relationships, so I decided to cut that essay.
HOPKINS: It’s one of the reasons why it can be so challenging for memoirists to write about family.
HONEY: I made the very conscious decision that I wasn't ready to write about my family at length. It's hard to write a dating memoir without digging deep into those daddy issues, but I found a way to do it. In a way, Obama is my father figure in this book. A lot of people tell me I was too easy on the men in my memoir. But because I'm writing about myself, I'm dissecting my own actions, and those men are just characters for me to project myself on to. Those men today are not who they were 15 years ago; I only experienced a very small sliver of them. You start to realize that maybe there were no villains here, just imperfect people. When you take a step back, you can ask more interesting questions, like what made me show up for this and how much of that is mine to own? And how much of that is larger cultural programming that I received as a woman, and more specifically, as a woman of color? I'm sure that if any of my exes wrote a dating memoir, they would have things to say about twenty-something Minda that wouldn't necessarily be true today. I always try to remind people that at the end of the day, these people are characters that have gone through the organ grinder and come out the other side as art.
HOPKINS: The book’s tone shifts at the death of Trayvon Martin. I was so impressed by the way you seamlessly wove the threads of your dating life with the overarching cultural and political context.
HONEY: Thank you. I live in Louisville, the home of Breonna Taylor and I sold this book in 2020. As I was finishing this book, I was in the midst of all of these social justice protests. It brought the intensity of Trayvon Martin's murder to the forefront. It gave me some additional insight and framework to process that time in my past with the insight of our present time. Some folks asked me why I didn't write more about Breonna Taylor, particularly as a Black woman, and why I focused more on Trayvon Martin. The reality is that I am still living through the aftermath of Breonna Taylor's murder. I am a Black woman living in Louisville, Kentucky, seeing the ways in which that impacted our city, all the things that have changed and the things that have not changed. Daniel Cameron, who tried to bury what had happened to Breonna Taylor, is now running for governor of our state and he wants to ban birth control. I am living this reality now, so I am not quite in a place to write about that yet, but what I can do is work through these feelings now. I don't think I've said all I have to say about that.
HOPKINS: I was so moved by the way you described Breonna Taylor in photos, much in the way you described yourself at her age.
HONEY: I was a professor at the time [of Breonna Taylor’s murder], so I had students her age, students who lived in her neighborhood, students who knew her family. I thought about twenty-something Minda as I was writing, but I also saw my students and these younger Black women. I had to ask myself, am I safer from the police than Breonna Taylor was because I live in a certain zip code? Her place was 15 minutes from where my home is. So thinking about what this means for me, as a Black woman, in a city where the police burst into the home of an innocent Black woman and murdered her, I also have to unpack my privilege around that and what those privileges are actually worth. I am light-skinned. I live in a certain zip code. I'm middle class, I have a college degree. I can't count on those things to keep me safe from the police, but they don't count for nothing. So where is the middle ground? And what does that mean for me? And what does that mean in terms of my responsibility to my community? And myself? These are questions I'll be wrestling with for a long time.
To learn more about Minda Honey’s writing and book tour, visit www.mindahoney.com.
Leigh Hopkins is the Editor and Curator of KHÔRA, a dynamic online arts space conceived and produced in collaboration with author Lidia Yuknavitch and Corporeal Writing. Leigh is a columnist at The Rumpus, and her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Longreads, McSweeney’s, Entropy, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. After the publication of Leigh’s essay The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes (Longreads), she was featured in a Brazilian documentary by the film crew who first exposed the crimes of John of God, the world’s most famous “spiritual surgeon.” In 2010, Leigh left a career in social policy to move to Brazil, where she founded an online institute by rigging a satellite dish to a boulder in a banana field. Before moving to Brazil, Leigh was a leader in the design, development and implementation of the after school literacy program model Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET), which was referenced by President Obama in the New York Times as an example of what’s possible in community-based institutions. As the Vice President for Education of a leading social policy think tank, Leigh provided support to 500 literacy programs in historically underserved communities throughout the United States.