Mara Brock Akil Is Telling Her Most Personal Story Yet

12 min read

Trigger warning: This story includes mentions of childhood sexual abuse.

Mara Brock Akil has spent her career creating a canon of compelling, complex, deeply human Black female characters—first as the showrunner of beloved series like Girlfriends, The Game, and Being Mary Jane, and, most recently, with Netflix’s award-winning YA drama Forever. Over the course of her decades-long career, she has broken barriers writing the kind of Black women Hollywood was often too timid to put on screen: brilliant and flawed, beautiful and audacious, worthy of love while still very much being works in progress. In doing so, she has quietly forced generations of Black women to confront our relationship with shame and perfection and how much we lose when we allow either to keep us from being our most authentic selves.

Now, at 56, Akil is putting her pen to literal paper with her debut novel, The Revelation of Dionne Daphne, out June 30. Set in 1991, the book centers on 33-year-old Dionne, a Brooklyn-based editor at Essence. Over the course of two weeks, as a possible medical crisis takes her on a journey that forces her to reckon with her sexual history, the book follows Dionne as the carefully maintained surface she has spent her whole life polishing begins to crack open into something far more honest.

Through her most vulnerable offering yet, Akil explores themes of sexual abuse, family trauma, liberation, and the dark side of the American dream, built from puzzle pieces she has been quietly collecting for years. In the conversation that follows, she opens up to ELLE about this new chapter, the parts of herself she poured into Dionne, and the revelations she hopes readers find between the pages.

How exciting is it to be at this stage of your career doing something new—getting to experience the thrill of a whole new medium?

It feels absolutely incredible. I feel like I get to tap into the innocence of my human spirit. It’s almost like being around children or young people at the beginning of their careers. I’m in alignment with them, but of course I have another level of wisdom and years of experience. So it’s this duality. And doing this, it feels like I’m dancing. Delightful is the word that keeps coming up. I’m just delighted.

You are one of the most celebrated storytellers of our generation, but up until now you’ve built your legacy in television. Why was this the right moment in your career to write a novel?

I believe in the alchemy of life. To be honest, the universe—through my editor—rang the doorbell. The storm of COVID, as horrific as it was, had a silver lining: we all got a chance to take a breath. Being prolific means I’m always moving, hustling, going, doing, running. And in that moment of stillness, I was open to receiving a lovely note from someone saying, “Hey, I’m a fan of the work. It raised me. I think your voice would translate beautifully to the page.” And consider it.

I immediately thought about this project. The subject matter is something I’d been touching on throughout my work. Different puzzle pieces, but the book allowed me to bring it all together into a story I knew would be very difficult to tell and sell in television or film. Just because of the nature of how the algorithms value stories about us. Though we’re making inroads—and I’m a part of that movement—it’s still very difficult to tell this level of interiority about a Black woman. And cross-generational. And a period piece set in the ’90s—if you say “Black woman in the ’90s,” they’re like, “Next.” So I pivoted. I’m not afraid of the hard work, though it is disappointing that you can have all the credentials in the world and still hit those walls. You take that hit, journal through it, take it to therapy, take it to a friend—and then you ask yourself, what are you going to do after that? I decided to pivot. Do the work. Write the book.

You say your stories always begin with a question, and the question driving this novel is: “Does our sexual agency truly stem from personal liberation, or is it shaped by the sexual violence woven into America’s origin story?” How did you land on this topic for the book? Because I think the girls are going to come in expecting a fun and sexy romance novel.

[Laughs.] There’s some romance in there! First of all, I thought about me. I really was my first audience. I needed to let go of this story. I needed to alchemize the lemons in my life and make something with them. You can see me dealing with some of these same subjects in Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane, Love Is—even in Forever, Keisha is written with a complexity around daddy issues. I’m always curious about how the things that happen to us guide us. Are these things really me? Or is this who I am because of what happened to me and my slow rebuild of myself?

What I think the younger generations have powerfully done is give language to that curiosity about ourselves. They’re willing to be brave enough to look at themselves and name things. What is this thing I’m doing? So for this book, I gave myself permission to really look at that bowl of lemons and do something with it. And in doing so, I also wanted to free myself to write something different next. Maybe the genre is me. Maybe there are other ways I can tell stories. But first I had to say—hey, would you mind being curious with me through this portrait of Dionne? She’s willing to lay down her shame. Are you willing to lay yours down too? And when you relieve yourself of that burden, then who are you? What would you write once you’re free of it?

The topic of women’s sexual agency has long felt too fragile to poke holes in. Much of society still slut shames sexually liberated women and has a hard time believing that kind of behavior can come from a healthy place. Did you have any trepidation about pulling back that curtain?

Trepidation is my compass. If I’m saying I’m a craftsman interested in the human condition, I’m supposed to look deeper. I’m supposed to be scared to say the thing, or to consider the thing—and that’s probably exactly where I should go. What makes me nervous is the idea that people won’t just dislike it, but that they won’t hear it. Part of being Black in America is that we’ve had to maintain this image of perfection in order to survive and be accepted. That creates a lot of anxiety. We’re fearful of making mistakes. And one of the things we were taught is that you don’t air your dirty laundry, but that can keep us trapped in things we need to free ourselves from.

Trepidation lives at that door of, “Are people going to cancel you?” But in your 50s, you start to think about life differently. There’s more death around you. Literal death. And you start to ask yourself: I have the privilege of waking up—what am I doing with it? So you go in. And what happens to trepidation once you’re deep in the story is, it gets lost. You’re swimming, you’re surfing, you’re exploring—you’re alive on those pages. The question then becomes: How far is too far? Did I do too much? Are they going to be like, I came for a beach read, what is this? But I had to find a way to get you to listen. To get you curious about that question.

Yes, and my takeaway was not that you’re saying having an active sex life has to be a result of trauma or violence—but that in some people’s cases it’s possible, and it’s important to ask yourself the question so you can investigate what’s behind it. It’s about the journey.

The journey is the point. Because at some point, let’s say you had an experience like Dionne’s, it’s now a part of who you are, a part of your journey. But if you at least know where it came from, now you can choose: “I understand why I might want this. And I can choose people who I can be safe with, who will help protect that.” Or: “I know why I don’t want that, and now I have a voice to say so in my next relationship.” That is true agency—not the absence of desire or complexity, but the ability to own it from a place of understanding. That’s why Joan (Girlfriends) had a three-month rule before having sex in relationships. There was a part of Mara at one point that said, maybe we need to slow down, maybe I jump in too quickly because I’m still looking for daddy. And I gave that to Joan. But now, after reading this book, you can see why. There are parts of myself I’ve given as gifts to my work, and in doing so I get to let go as I examine these aspects of myself.

And that is a self-love story.

The ultimate love story. To be able to rescue yourself, stand up for yourself, look at yourself, have revelations throughout, and heal yourself—that is the greatest love story. And then, wow, let’s find friends and a partner from that stage.

Without giving too much away, let’s get into the book’s main character, Dionne Daphne. She’s a 33-year-old Black woman, a Brooklyn-based editor at Essence, who is perfect on the surface, but carrying tremendous complexity underneath. How did this character come to you?

I lived in magazines growing up. I love being on the ground, among people. You walk in Midtown and you see this cute brown girl with the bob, moving through these streets—and the world might not see her, but I see her. Sometimes the connecting smile will tell you something. And sometimes if they’re not locking in, if their eyes are somewhere else, I ask myself, What are they hiding? Why don’t they want me to see them? That’s my entry point.

I’m also very curious about my mother’s generation and mine. We pioneered new ground. Women in my mother’s time had a very different set of possible dreams, and I’m excited about Dionne representing young Black women taking over new territory. But also—and this is what makes her so rich—taking over new territory before we’ve healed what we’re bringing with us. In Being Mary Jane, she’s a reporter who lives in a glass house and throws stones. Dionne is the same: on the outside, she is everything. But on the inside, she is aching, and she’s covering it up. Makeup can enhance, but it can also be what we’re hiding.

You have always been fearless in how you write Black women—Joan, Toni, Maya, Lynn, Mary Jane, Melanie, Tasha, Keisha, Dawn. You’ve never asked them to be “respectable” or “palatable,” and in doing so you’ve forced us to reckon with how desperately we want Black women characters to be flawless. Why is it important to you to give us portraits of complicated, difficult, deeply human women?

Because that is what a human is. Perfection is not humanity; it’s actually just as damaging as the negative images we’ve been given to shame us and keep us small. Perfection keeps us locked up. Keeps us not living. Freedom is getting to be all of who I am and still being worth protecting and loving. Now, I do have a responsibility to be the best version of myself—but the best version does not mean perfection. And perfect by whose measure?

Once I understood the tension you were forcing us to sit with over the course of the two weeks the book takes place, I wanted to scream. Readers are going to have to force themselves not to skip to the end for the answer we’re waiting for alongside Dionne. Why did you decide to do that to us?

Because of that. To make people sit and think about it. We have to learn how to sit. It’s okay to feel the tension. We keep wanting to run away from it. But in that tension, Dionne had a lot of revelations. You have to sit to go get them. In the dark, the cave—guess what else is in caves? Jewels. The jewels are the revelations and the understanding. It’s like cleaning out a closet. Nobody really wants to do it, but you want the final result—you just have to go through it first. And I also borrowed from my television work: at Netflix, you’ve got to keep people binging. The two weeks kept you motivated—I brought the binge to the book.

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A lot of people disappoint Dionne over the course of this story, but her best friend isn’t one of them. All of your work celebrates friendship as one of the only truly sustaining anchors women have. Why does that bond carry so much weight for us?

Writing this book gave me a greater understanding of why Girlfriends still resonates—and why I wrote it 25 years ago. What I realized is that the power of friendship can be the surrogate parent until you are strong enough to parent yourself back into healing.

And even in the book, you see where the friendship begins, and how many of us are performative friends. We do all the fun stuff together and can say, “Yeah, girl, you do you.” But do we feel safe enough to truly be seen? Part of what the book does is take you on a journey of what it looks like to really be there for someone going through something hard. To model it. And I think the future of any relationship—romantic or otherwise—has to be rooted in friendship. Because friendship can give us a roadmap for how to enter into any relationship from a more healed place.

The conversations between Dionne and her family were some of the most compelling, heaviest passages in the book. They read like therapy sessions. I found myself gaining insight into my own family dynamics even though I’ve never been through what Dionne experienced. What has storytelling taught you about families—and specifically the way we can wound each other despite our best intentions? Because even the characters who caused Dionne harm—you humanize them. There’s no clear villain.

Toni from Girlfriends was one of my first characters who really taught me this. I ask all of my characters: “How did they get here? How did they arrive at this behavior, at this choice?” Each character has their own book inside them, in a way, and I have to understand them fully in order for Dionne’s journey to make sense.

There’s a beautiful line in the book about how telling our stories unburdens our spirits. You’ve spoken a bit about the personal truths you had to unearth to write this. Now that you’ve released it—what has telling this particular story unburdened your spirit of?

I tell people—anyone who asks—that what I went through as a child brought me into a relationship with God and that relationship allows me to move past trepidation into my gift. God holds me in these places. So I had to ask, “Why did you give this to me? Why is this my experience?” And the answer that came back was: “Because you can tell it in the way that you are feeling it. You can show how we alchemize it.” I’m brave enough to show it through this character, this thing that happened to Dionne and me, and do something with it.

I am a survivor. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse. That’s who I am. And this book is what I’ve done with that lemon.

What I want people to understand is that shame is not just in sexual trauma. Shame is guiding so much of how we move through the world—the burden of capitalism, of performance, of survival. And if we let that go, if we’re just honest about it, we might access who we really are. We might access the gifts of that and share in that wisdom. Silence kept me in it. Silence helped me survive it. And silence ultimately created this voice in me as a writer. My voice has lived on the page for a long time. I’m still getting used to trusting my literal voice. But that freedom—that is liberating. The audience is ready to listen now. And the fact that this book is coming out at a time when people are naming things, when they want true understanding—I know what my walk is about. And that’s why I can move past the trepidation and put it on the page.

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