The Audacity.: The Audacious Book Club

Black. Single. Mother.: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves

Roxane Gay — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:35:38 GMT

One thing I really loved about this book was how honest and self-reflective Jamilah was about her own less-than-flattering behavior. It is risky and brave to admit to your own faults and ways you wish you would have done things more maturely. Writing like this, that is vulnerable and honest, always encourages me to think about the narratives I’ve been told or believe about myself. We all have these personal mythologies that reality sometimes contradicts. In what ways could you be a better communicator in inter-personal relationships? In what areas could you afford to give yourself more grace? Have you been able to recognize and thought patterns or behaviors that weren’t working for you and meaningfully change them? How did you do it?

Black. Single. Mother.: What Makes a Family

Roxane Gay — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:49:03 GMT

Black. Single. Mother. starts with author Jamilah Lemieux opening up about her experience with her own Black single mother, mostly absent father, and her own journey into single motherhood. For those of you who were raised by single parents, what did your experience look like? Did you see parts of your story in what Jamilah shared? What behaviors did your parent(s) have that you looked up to or wanted to emulate? How did you want to do things differently?

Jamilah discusses the idea of family done “the right way,” and how that both motivated her and kept her in a cycle of insecurity. When you were younger, did you have any assumptions about what it meant to have a perfect family? How have your expectations changed when confronted with the challenges of day-to-day living? “The Perfect Family” might be a myth, but what qualities do you think a good family has?

Introducing Black. Single. Mother.

Roxane Gay — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:35:37 GMT

In September 2009, writer and cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux wrote an open letter to Tyler Perry. In that letter, Lemieux talked about how she appreciated Perry’s dedication to giving jobs to Black people and how his work often features empowering messages about love and self-worth threaded with humor. But still, Lemieux said, she felt conflicted about Perry’s work:

The images of black people we see in your movies and two TV shows, Meet The Browns and House Of Payne, are not always fair…both your shows are marked by old stereotypes of buffoonish, emasculated black men and crass, sassy black women. I’d like to support your work, I really would — because I’d like to see people who look like me on TV. But I can’t let advertisers and networks think that these stereotypes are acceptable.

These depictions, wrote Lemieux, have been challenged by Black and white critics alike, and they were damaging enough that they should be reconsidered. She ended with a call for Perry to shift his narratives: “I beg of you, stop dismissing the critics as haters and realize that black people need new stories and new storytellers.”

Since 2009, Lemieux has become one of those new storytellers. In addition to publishing an engaging (and now defunct) blog called The Beautiful Struggler, Lemieux has served as an editor for Ebony, written for publications such as Essence, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Slate, and served as an advisor for political campaigns including Cynthia Nixon’s and Elizabeth Warren’s. Now, Lemieux has also written her first book, Black. Single. Mother.: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging, which challenges the stereotypes about single black motherhood in America.

Black. Single. Mother. interweaves anecdotes about Lemieux’s parents, her childhood, and her own parenting and co-parenting journey with trenchant and rigorous cultural analysis of topics ranging from the infamous Moynihan Report, to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, to the history of violence against Black women, to the ethics and challenges of being a high-profile single mother on social media.

In the last third of the book, Lemieux invites other Black single mothers to share their motherhood experiences. Doing this allows these women to tell their stories in their own voices instead of having those stories refracted through a cultural lens that often treats Black single mothers as a punch line, a source of derision, or worse.

Black. Single. Mother. is a bracing, vulnerable, deeply moving read, a book that manages to master both the first-person confessional and temper it with elements of ethnography, creating a book that is both a memoir and a dynamic map of a community of Black women who are often maligned, misunderstood, and profoundly underestimated. I’m looking forward to discussing it with you throughout the month of April. We will be in conversation with Jamilah on April 29 at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET. You can register here.

Have you started Black. Single. Mother? What are your early impressions? If you’re a single parent, from any background, what do you most wish people knew about your experience?

Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Access, and Power

Roxane Gay — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:15:33 GMT

Let’s talk about the politics of food and food access. What stood out to you from your reading about the ways in which food and power are connected? The urge to care for and feed each other is at odds with the ideology that there’s no such thing as a “free lunch.” In what ways is feeding and making sure others are fed radical? Why do you think those in …

Tell Me How You Eat: Literally, Like... Tell Me

Roxane Gay — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:38:40 GMT

Amber Husain begins Tell Me How You Eat by sharing the difficulties she had with her appetite and feeding herself during the pandemic. Let’s talk about eating. Tell us how you eat! How has your relationship to food and keeping yourself fed changed over the course of your life? Is there a discrepancy between how you’d like to eat and how you actually eat…

Introducing Tell Me How You Eat

Megan Pillow — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:15:30 GMT

In her second book Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh, Amber Husain writes about John Berger’s 1979 book Pig Earth, a work of fiction that he wrote after spending time living in a peasant community in France. Berger, notes Husain, chronicles the story of a pig who has been fed “like family” until the day he is slaughtered. That visceral moment of slaug…

The Age of Calamities: Haunted Houses

Roxane Gay — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:35:17 GMT

“Inside the House of the Historian” really delivers on the spooky, surreal, and unsettling elements of a good haunted house tale. What did you think of this particular cast of characters? What do the dynamics between the historian, the professor, and the dinner guests say about academia, media, and what people and events get remembered? What do you thin…

The Age of Calamities: Acts of Possession

Roxane Gay — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:15:24 GMT

In “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune,” we get to read another possession story! What do you enjoy about this particular plot device, and how does the presence of another consciousness help us understand the interiority of the possessed character? What do you think possession stories have to say about consent and bodily autonomy? There’s a great line o…

The Age of Calamities: Survival Skills

Roxane Gay — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:15:18 GMT

I loved the story “The Wolves,” and it reminded me of I Who Have Never Known Men, which I read last year and highly recommend. What do you think this story, along with others you’re reading in the collection, has to say about violence against women? On page 45, she says, “it’s such a waste of time, dearest boy, to fear you’ll be disbelieved. But what ca…

The Age of Calamities: Losing Your Head

Roxane Gay — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 15:15:25 GMT

The Age of Calamities starts with a bang—in “Let’s Play Dead,” a beheaded Anne Boleyn pieces herself together and returns to Henry, who proceeds to kill her again and again and again. In what ways does this fictionalized version of a historical event make us understand it differently? How, paradoxically, do the fantastical elements bring out the truth? …

The 2026 Audacious Book Club Selections

Roxane Gay — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:48:52 GMT

There are so many amazing books published each year so it is really difficult to pick just one a month (and in October, well, we picked two), but here is what we will be reading this year. As a reminder, if you’d like to receive the books automatically each month, you can sign up with Allstora, our book purveyor. And here are our FAQs.

January

The Hitch by Sara Levine

February

The Age of Calamities, by Senaa Ahmad.

March

Tell Me How You Eat by Amber Husain

April

Black. Single. Mother. By Jamilah Lemieux

May

The Violence: My Colombian War by Adriana Ramirez

June

John of John by Douglas Stuart

July

Pool House by Mary HK Choi

August

The Simp by Roshan Sethi

September

Reality TV for Snobs by Ali Barthwell

October

The Disappearers by Marlon James
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw

November

The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

What are you looking forward to reading this year? What would you like to see from our book club and discussions? We’re listening!

Behind the paywall, a book giveaway for paid subscribers.

Introducing The Age of Calamities

Megan Pillow — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:35:17 GMT

In her 2019 story “The Skin of a Teenage Boy Is Not Alive,” Senaa Ahmad’s protagonist Parveen has heard the story of her classmate Benny’s possession by a demon, but she has missed the event. Benny, who tells the “dumb demon cult kids” that he wants to get possessed, then proceeds to fall off the roof of the house where all the teenagers are partying ri…

The Hitch: Acts of Possession

Roxane Gay — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:46:00 GMT

Although this is our first demon-corgi-possession book in the Audacious Book Club, we have read many novels that play with the idea of spirits lingering, including our November and December books. In what ways does this sillier possession story address not-so-silly themes? So many things can go wrong while watching children, but how did the presence of …

The Hitch: Unsolicited Advice

Roxane Gay — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:35:21 GMT

Rose had a lot of opinions about parenting and ethical living that she shared, unprompted, with others. What’s the most wild piece of unsolicited advice you’ve ever received? Has any unsolicited advice ever been helpful? As a childless adult, I can understand parents’ frustration with non-parents giving parenting advice. I actualy try to never, ever giv…

The Hitch: To Be an Aunt

Roxane Gay — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:41:45 GMT

As an enthusiastic aunt myself, I immediately understood Rose’s excitement for the opportunity to spend a whole week with her beloved nephew. I laughed at all the plans she made and at all the expectations she had for the visit and how reality, sometimes, was far different from what I anticipated.

Being an aunt is one of my favorite things, particularly …

Introducing The Hitch by Sara Levine

Roxane Gay — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:35:54 GMT

In “Refusal,” the opening essay of Savala Nolan’s new essay collection, Good Woman: A Reckoning, she writes, “ I refuse to be good. This is a matter of survival, not inclination or mood. I refuse to be easy, and I refuse others’ preferences. I refuse to be amicable, and I refuse to appease. I refuse to go along, and I refuse to agree.” Ever since I firs…

Cursed Daughters: A Sense of Place

Roxane Gay — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:35:20 GMT

I loved the imagery and dynamics in Braithwaite’s depiction of Lagos. If you’ve been to Lagos, how does the writing of the city in this novel compare with the real place?

A novel really soars when place becomes a character. Everything happens somewhere, after all. What did you learn about Lagos while reading this novel? In what ways does the specificity…

Cursed Daughters: Managing Expectations

Roxane Gay — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:35:27 GMT

I really loved that Eniiyi’s career ambition is to counsel those who have to deal with inherited/genetic illnesses, which is an interesting way to look at her family’s own curse. What steps does Eniiyi take to fight against that curse? In what ways do tradition and trauma heighten tensions in the family home? In your own life, have you had to manage fam…

Cursed Daughters: Grief Is a Process

Roxane Gay — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:35:34 GMT

The women in Ebun’s family all handle their grief differently, whether they are grieving Monife’s death or the repercussions of their family curse. What did you notice about these depictions of grief, and how does generational trauma factor in? If you’ve experienced a great loss, what did you learn about how you need to grieve? What advice would you giv…

Cursed Daughters: Extended Family

Roxane Gay — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:35:18 GMT

Early in the novel, we read about when Ebun met her cousin Monife, giving context to their relationship in the wake of Monife’s suicide. How did Monife’s arrival at the family home change the trajectory of Ebun’s life? Have you ever had an unexpected, close relationship with an extended family member? Let’s talk about it! What made that relationship spe…