The World's Ending and I'm Mad at Shonda Rhimes
a year of yes
book review
I'm mad at Shonda Rhimes. When I sit to think about it, I guess I’ve felt this way for a while now. It started with Grey's Anatomy, the first TV series I ever binged. That show was an emotional rollercoaster that had me falling in love with fictional doctors, crying my eyes out and amazed at how someone that wasn’t Toni Morrison, could create something so beautifully complex and enthralling. Shonda opened up TV as a medium worth spending time with for me.
Each show was centered on real women imperfectly responding to life's challenges in the beautifully intricate ways only humans can. I couldn’t look away. So yeah, I've been mad at Shonda Rhimes the same way I get mad and kiss my teeth at how mind-blowingly decadent the first bite of sticky date coconut cake is at Christmas. This time I’m mad thanks to her book Year of Yes.
Year of Yes Review
I typically don’t read autobiographies or self-help books but I read this one because it was selected for Gyallivant Book Club; a space for Black women and women of colour to read, relax, have fun and get introduced to new ideas together. I hit play on audible and pretty quickly got mad at Shonda all over again. The kiss teeth, throw down the fork in utter and complete disbelief type of mad l mentioned earlier. This woman can write! She weaves a story about staring discontent right in the face and deciding to say yes to a year of change. From chapter to chapter I wanted to know more about her journey.
On average the gyal fam gave the book a 3.4 out of 5 with many people in the group agreeing that it was good to start the year thinking about what's possible if you lean in. Not everyone took to Rhimes’ writing style or bought into her quirky, awkward persona. It was also interesting to discuss the validity of her yes gospel when for some, saying yes led to painful consequences that took considerable time and effort to recover from. So for them, they were cautious about saying yes again.
My personal rating of the book is a solid 3.75 out of 5. As usual, the writing was great. Rhimes and I have a similar quirk that comes from growing up with fictional characters as friends, so l enjoyed her writing style.
What stood out most to me is Rhimes’ endearing honesty. Surprise surprise, the compelling realness in Shondaland productions, seems to come from Shonda herself. She opens the book with a disclaimer saying “I’m old and I like to lie” (p. 6). Rhimes is describing her love for writing fiction, which is essentially the art of fib making, but also warning the reader that some details in the book may not have happened exactly as written. Most writers wouldn’t put this in print let alone be as insistent and earnest about it before the book really starts. Whether it's a calculated move to gain the reader’s trust or not, it works. I’m immediately put at ease and more receptive to everything that comes next.
My resistance to making it a full 5 comes from my aversion to the genre as a whole. No autobiography I’ve come across can take the place that a carefully crafted fiction has in my heart. I’m happy to be proven wrong if you have any recommendations; but it would be a big feat solely because of everything that is happening today in the world. Self-help or autobiography as a whole fall flat for me when held up against this time in history. Simply bearing witness to overlapping atrocities has me laid out and so listless that liberation becomes an ideal rather than an attainable goal. The world is ending and the positivity inherent in these genres feel like not only an affront to reality, but also an invitation to join the charade that everything will be okay by simply saying yes to a better world or by making tiny changes for remarkable results. It lands as an individual pursuit rather than the collective change we desperately need.
The world's ending
Some cultural theorists suggest that for many communities, the very fabric of life as they knew it has been so fundamentally unravelled, that it can only be understood as the end of the world. The world's ending. It's ended before and it'll end again. Black feminist writer and activist Robyn Maynard in her work on Afrofuturism puts it perfectly :
““while the apocalypse is generally conceived as a dystopic possible futurity, the African diaspora has already undergone brutalities so vile and degrading, and so historically unprecedented in scope and scale, that only Armageddon can accurately describe the advent of modernity on our collective past, and only the postapocalypse can define our present” (p. 30-31).”
For African people being stuffed into the bottom of ships and carted to North America, life as they knew it had come to an end and they were faced with a grotesque and unimaginable evil. To explain the aftermath of this reality, postapocalypse feels fitting. History teaches us that beauty and life is possible in the postapocalypse. Black American culture is proof of that. In many ways too tangled to get into here, I am proof of that as well. Even still, any recovery from this moment in history, where institutions are crumbling and decency seems to be a tall order, makes it hard to avoid melting into despair. With all this happening, saying yes to giving a speech or going to a gala is the least of my concerns. I'm more thinking about how to save the world or at least how to save me and mine.
I don't know if Rhimes would agree with this extension, but maybe the Year of Yes ethos is all about saying yes to what's important to you and not letting the mundanity of daily life suck you into autopilot. Maybe it's about having your eye on the mark, so when all is said and done, you can rest easy knowing that you lived on your terms. Maybe that is worth saying yes to. God help us.