Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

With her bracing, witty, and incisive reflections on her experience as a young black woman in 21st-century America, Morgan Jerkins has arrived as one of the essential voices of our moment, discussing racism, sexism, and the paradoxes that she encounters in her career as a writer and editor. She joins Miwa Messer in the studio for an animated chat about her bestselling new collection: This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America.

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From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins’ highly-anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a black woman today—perfect for fans of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists.

Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to “be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans.

Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.

Whether she’s writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color”; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the “Black Girl Magic” movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

Author photo of Morgan Jerkins (c) Sylvie Rosokoff.

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The first dog I ever owned was a Doberman Pinscher. Snickers came into my life when I was six years old, and we named him after the candy bar. He was many things, but he wasn’t a guard dog. One night, a stranger knocked on our front door, and my dad got a bad vibe. “We have a vicious dog,” he lied. But to support the bluff, he hooked a hand around Snickers’ collar and tried to pull him toward the front hallway. He wouldn’t budge. Snickers had no interest in protecting us that night, but there are countless other ways in which he made himself a vital part of our family, including leading my grandmother and me home when we were lost in the woods during a blizzard.

It’s not easy to talk about the connection between humans and dogs without seeming saccharine and being labeled as trite. But Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend is a wholly original novel about that sacred bond. An unnamed female writer is devastated when her good friend and former teacher kills himself, and befuddled when she finds out that he named her as someone who could take care of his beloved, elderly harlequin Great Dane named Apollo. But she loves animals, and — even though she is by her own admission a “cat person,” she finds herself moved to take on this unforeseen charge.

There’s a snag right away: Dogs aren’t allowed in her 500-square-foot Manhattan apartment, but the gigantic creature makes a home for himself there, lounging on her bed and taking up the limited space. It’s uncomfortable at first, but the narrator grows deeply attached to him. Apollo picks up on her grief, and one day he brings a book to her, as if he knows she will feel better if she reads it aloud. He is soothed by her voice, and she’s soothed by his presence. “What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?” she asks herself.

Apollo’s presence is also a route to reflections on her friend’s life, and death. It’s a relationship portrayed as having a convincing messiness — not least because it crossed over briefly into sex. Nor had the friend’s suicide come as a complete shock -– he had hinted at what was to come “Once, you cracked us up with the line I think I’d prefer a novella of a life.” In his absence, the writer does what writers do — she writes about who he was and how he viewed the world. It’s a way to understand her own feelings; a testament to their friendship. But telling his story comes with its own sense of guilty appropriation. “A major theme in the work of Christa Wolf is the fear that writing about someone is a way of killing that person,” she says. ” . . . The shame of being a writer haunted her all her life.”

Nunez’s novel is packed with pithy observations about her chosen profession, often from the dead friend: “At a conference once, you startled the packed audience by saying, Where do all you people get the idea that being a writer is a wonderful thing?” she remembers. He had quoted Georges Simenon on the literary life: “Not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.”

These starkly honest moments give some texture to an otherwise simple story: woman loses a mentor she might have been in love with and finds solace in a dog. Boiling the book down to that basic synopsis doesn’t do justice to the backbone of this novel. The Friend is as much about grieving as it is about being a writer, drawing on quotations from voices as disparate as Czesław Miłosz, Virginia Woolf, and Rainer Maria Rilke as a way to engage with a question most authors ask themselves: Can you write your way through painful experiences? Nunez suggests that you can. Her unnamed narrator’s journey from solitude to a shared solitude with a dog is moving, for sure, but never in an overly sentimental manner. What makes the book work is the way The Friend reflects on loss, life, and creativity in such a straightforward and bold way: “In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.”

That image is a memorable acknowledgement of writing’s role as psychic self-defense; a way to fight against the sharp pain of loss. But in the best moments, it’s an act of surrender. “What we miss — what we lose and what we mourn — isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are,” the narrator writes. “To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.” The Friend is proof that what we lack is itself a vital part of life — and that loss can lead to meaningful connections found in unlikely places. Sometimes it can take an animal to make a person understand their own humanity. And sometimes a book as unexpected as The Friend can provide as much comfort as any canine companion.

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