Mara Brock Akil
Mara Brock Akil
Mara Brock Akil, award-winning showrunner and creator of Girlfriends, Netflix’s hit show Forever, and more, is a master at world-building, and now she’s expanding her talents with her debut novel, The Revelation of Dionne Daphne.
The novel, currently on pre-sale and releasing on June 30th, distinctly mirrors Akil’s knack for beautifully crafting complex, multi-layered, and dynamic female heroines who fearlessly lead their own stories and navigate life’s difficulties. The Revelation of Dionne Daphne is an emotionally enthralling debut novel about enduring love, world-shattering secrets, self-awakening, an anchoring sisterhood, and the courage to address painful moments in your past and move toward a renewed future with confidence.
With gripping themes of sexual agency, shame, generational trauma, and ambition, set against a 90s backdrop, the novel is compelling and packed with revelatory moments, making it a page-turner. Its protagonist, Dionne Daphne, a modern, 33-year-old, Black woman and New Yorker, is accomplished, gorgeous, and magnetic. She is the beauty editor at a prestigious magazine, with a social life of the upper echelon, and a seemingly desirable boyfriend, but as always with Akil’s characters, there’s more that meets the eye.
Underneath her glossy exterior, there’s turmoil and contained chaos. The reader meets the character as she receives life-threatening news that cracks the facade of her picture-perfect life: a potentially life-changing HIV test result that ultimately upends everything she knew to be true. Throughout the book, the reader journeys with her as she sets out on a spur-of-the-moment road trip with an unlikely stranger to confront the long-buried darkness of her past, brought on by familial secrets, culminating in a cathartic reckoning and the discovery of new possibilities for her life after rigorous self-examination.
Akil’s debut novel expands her storytelling from television’s exterior gaze into the interior, intricate psychology of Black womanhood, where image, trauma, and self-reckoning collapse into a single narrative space.
When creating the novel, Akil was inspired by the collective interest in self-examination and the interior self. “Now’s the right time, because we are as a collective more interested in each other. I think we’re less afraid to look within. I think we’re really ready to examine the interior self, and we’re willing to be witnesses to each other; we’re learning how to hold space,” she said to me. “I’m always looking for canvas to write the interiority of us. I feel like our humanity is within. I’m trying to paint portraits of us in real time to document our humanity, and one of the things I want people to see more deeply is that we see ourselves as human. I wanted to take the gray area between the negative images that we have been fed and start to believe and overcorrect with the sense of perfection of positive images, which is just as damaging, because that’s not real either, and that our humanity belongs in the gray area.”
Although Akil has written countless stories on screen, she told me she feels like an “ingenue,” as this is her first novel. “My ability to expand my conversation with a beautiful audience that has been riding with me, as you even mentioned, growing up with the thoughts that I have, makes me so excited,” she shared. Writing a novel for the first time has also allowed her to learn new things about herself and craft. “What writing the book taught me about myself that TV hasn’t, is what I have been trying to express in the meet in the television and film media medium; it tells me how, I’m going say this, real as the kids say unapologetically, how masterful I am at what I do in television and film,” she stated.
She continued, “I didn’t realize how difficult it is to entertain interiority, and I’m really proud of that. On the other hand, I think what the book taught me that TV didn’t, in terms of like my expansion as a writer, is how it helped me to define myself as a writer. I didn’t realize how much space I really needed to tell the story and how cathartic it is to begin a journey and end something. In my career, I have had to suffer through a lot of cancellations, and the empowerment that comes from writing the complete story, writing the end, knowing I got to end it the way I wanted, and owning it as well. That experience of owning the story fully I have never experienced in my career.”
For Akil, owning the story from start to finish gave her more room to explore the complexity and tension between image and reality with her protagonist, Dionne. “I’m fascinated by it. I’m so curious, like someone will catch my attention, and I’m curious about them. I’m curious about people; I’m curious about what we’re really carrying, and when we’re honest about the origin story of where we are, so we’re talking coming on the 250-year anniversary of our country. The origin story of America is this: it was not for everybody. They wrote that Constitution based upon their view of the world; it was built upon sexual and physical violence. When we acknowledge that storm, that truth, it bears to mind what else: that toxicity is somewhere. It’s somewhere in the house of America, and where is it showing up? It’s showing up in our now traumas, which this novel highlights,” she said. “We are still here, and we can turn around, and alchemize all that pain, and turn our lemons into lemonade, and rethink the future, not only of us as individuals, but collectively together, and build a new paradigm.”
Healing, from the inside out, is one of the prevalent themes in Akil’s novel, but so is sexual abuse and HIV: “Unfortunately, sexual abuse is very present in the household of America, and everybody’s in that household. I think as soon as you speak to your shame, it kind of- I’m not saying it’s not wobbly, but it almost loses all its power. It loses its power over you as soon as you give voice. I am a survivor of sexual abuse, and I gave that part of myself to Dionne, not the specifics. I wanted to explore what happens when you stay silent, what it can do to you personally, and the choices you make afterward by not acknowledging it, not acknowledging certain things, not giving space for certain things. Now today we are safer to do that than we’ve ever been,” she revealed.
She would like her newest character, Dionne, to be part of the cultural conversation on holistic healing. “As we continue to see ourselves as human, when we heal and see, seek and protect our own humanity, then we will, make America live up to its highest vision, and Black people in America have certainly been doing that since we got here, and certainly Black women, as we have been on the forefront, and I would love Dionne to be a part of the conversation about how we can approach healing practically,” she said.
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