Melissa Valentine was born and raised in Oakland, CA. Her nonfiction has appeared in Guernica, Jezebel, and Apogee among others. Valentine is a graduate of the MFA program at Mills College, and she is currently an executive editor at Callisto Media. Her memoir The Names of All the Flowers, published by The Feminist Press, was the 2019 winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Valentine lives in Brooklyn, NY.

EB: When and how were you first drawn to writing nonfiction? How did your memoir The Names of All the Flowers come about?

MV: I was always interested in writing about my family, because I wanted to understand them. That was something that was always in the back of my mind, even as a child. But it wasn’t until college that I started to explore writing in a more serious way. My path to writing actually started with activism—before I went to college, I was working as a community organizer in Oakland, where I’m from. I became politically active because my brother had been killed, and it made me aware for the first time of so much injustice. It was overwhelming to me. I wanted change and organizing felt like something tangible I could do.

Then I went to college at Sarah Lawrence, and I began to turn my activism into learning—about African American history and sociology and political movements around the world. It was a new way for me to think about activism. I studied abroad in Cuba my junior year, which was like going to the activists’ Mecca. Cuba is where the revolution happened! Che Guevara! I had this mystical idea about Cuba. I couldn’t believe I was there, in the middle of this place where the revolutionary masters came from—and then, it wasn’t like that at all. Talking to the people who lived in Cuba, who felt trapped, who wanted to leave but couldn’t, and the racism—it blew my mind. I wanted to write about it, but my Cuban advisor was against it. All of the inequality and racism in Cuba was kept hush-hush to promote the idea that after the revolution everything was behind them and done. Even though I could see the discrimination with my own eyes—I had made Afro-Cuban friends who weren’t allowed to come into the hotel where I was living. I did a lot of reflection in Cuba, and when I came back to Sarah Lawrence, I had decided that my path wasn’t going to be activism in the way that I had understood it before. It was going to be different approach, through writing. I began taking writing classes.

EB: Nonfiction?

MV: Fiction, actually. Fiction was my entry point into writing, and I think I was pretty bad at it. [laughter] I started trying to tell the story of my family in those classes, but at the same time I felt like I was avoiding it by writing it as fiction. Only once I took a nonfiction class on memoir did it click. I thought, Oh, this feels natural. I felt like I was finally learning the tools to tell the story that I always wanted to tell.

But then I put it aside for a long time. I graduated from college, I lived my life, I started a career and became an editor. Then, when I was in my mid-twenties, I thought, I should probably get a graduate degree, because that’s what you do.

EB: [laughter] I was also in my mid-twenties when I went to grad school.

MV: I ended up in the MFA program at Mills.

EB: For nonfiction?

MV: Nope, I still thought I wanted to write fiction, actually. I felt like, I want to master this, I want to get good at this. But it was a repeat of the same. I felt like I was circling around a story of my family, and what I was writing didn’t feel like the truth. My workshops even called me on that—that I was avoiding the truth. So, finally, I took a nonfiction class, and that’s where I began writing the first chapters of my memoir.

EB: It’s so interesting, so many of the nonfiction writers I’ve interviewed have told me they started by writing fiction that felt false. It’s like you want to avoid the thing you really need to write about at first.

MV: My story is super personal. I reveal a lot about my family, and that was scary. I think I just had to chase down that feeling before I could commit to nonfiction, you know?

EB: Totally. Once you committed to nonfiction, how did you go about it? You do such a fantastic job recreating vivid scenes, the book feels cinematic at times. What sort of research did you do to help yourself write so clearly about your past? Looking at old photos? Interviewing your siblings, parents? What else?

MV: That’s where the fiction comes in. I didn’t do a lot of research to begin with, because I felt that I needed to be alone with the memories and let them guide me. I didn’t look at journals or anything—I had all kinds of journals from when I was a kid and a teenager, but I didn’t want to look at any of them. I needed whatever would come out to come out, and after that I could deal with grappling with the facts. I didn’t even want to share it with anyone. Only after I had a first draft did I interview family members to make sure I had details correct, like dates and that kind of thing. But to begin with, I just used memory, because I really wanted to build and create vivid scenes—I am so glad you said that it felt vivid, because I just really wanted this book to feel alive. I wanted it to read like fiction.

EB: Oh, it definitely did. I was just so immersed in the story and the people. How did you approach creating characters out of people you know and love? I know you can never fully flatten a three-dimensional person on a two-dimensional page, it’s always going to be an incomplete version of them, but I feel like you managed to recreate really complex, intricate versions of your family members, especially your brother who died. How did you go about writing about him? Researching his life?

MV: I relied on memories from when we were younger, but when my brother was a teenager, we were a little bit more distant because I was four years younger than him. He was doing things I didn’t know about, though he’d let me into little parts of his life. I tried to capture that as vividly as I could, but there was a lot I didn’t see. And I was trying to frame his life and make some meaning out of his story, which is really hard to do with a life. So I had to talk to my parents—different details about what he was doing and when, and whether he had been bullied at school. They hadn’t used those words to describe things then, and then once he died, we didn’t talk about the details anymore. We didn’t talk about what we could have done. We didn’t talk about what went wrong. We were just sad. We grieved, and then we didn’t really talk about it anymore.

So I didn’t have a lot of those details from his later life, and that’s when I had to talk to my family to connect the dots. I had my memories, and what I thought happened, but I needed help from my parents and my siblings to fill it all in.

EB: This subject matter is traumatic and must have been hard to write about. Who do you turn to for support when writing, especially when writing about difficult topics? What sort of writer or artist community do you have? Who else is in your support network?

MV: That’s a great question. It’s been a process, and I didn’t know what I was getting into when I first started writing.

EB: Do any of us?

MV: I didn’t have a lot of tools at first. It took me seven years to write The Names of All the Flowers, the larger part of my twenties and my early thirties, and most people in their mid-twenties don’t have a lot of tools anyway.

EB: Very true.

MV: So how did I take care of myself? I mean, therapy. While writing The Names of All the Flowers, I was in therapy for many different reasons, and it was really helpful to deal with what came up around the book. It wasn’t just the pain of reliving and thinking about losing my brother when I was sixteen—it was lots of things that have impacted my life, and different types of trauma. So therapy was definitely a tool.

And reading was, too. My relationship to reading has been therapeutic at times. I look to other writers for guidance, in a self-help way, almost. Not that I’m reading self-help books, but I read memoirs, books by people who have gone through terrible things and written about them, and those writers give me so much courage and hope.

EB: I do that too. And, it’s funny, I can read the darkest, most depressing story if it is a memoir, because I know the main character, the author, makes it through in the end—because they lived to write about it. But dark fiction? Everyone could be dead at the end! Who knows?

MV: Yes!

EB: Were there any particular books that you relied on as a guide or for inspiration while you were writing The Names of All the Flowers?

MV: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls made a huge impact on me early on. The relationship that the narrator had to her father was so heartbreaking, and I could relate to it so much. And she went on to have a career and a life and everything, even after experiencing so much neglect. I made all my siblings read it—it was like she had written parts of our own experiences. Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres was another one, the sibling dynamic in that book was so beautiful. I actually ended up working alongside her at The Writers Grotto, and it’s so funny when you admire a writer so much and are influenced by them and then you meet them and see, oh, you’re just a regular person.

EB: [laughing] Yes. It’s kind of comforting in a way.

MV: And then, of course, Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped. I read that book and thought, she just wrote my book. Hers is a very different story, but she was one of the writers that gave me permission to tell mine.

EB: Besides books and therapy, who else do you turn to for support? What does your writing community look like? Or did you have to be alone with your memories for a lot of the writing of this book?

MV: I sat with a lot of it by myself, but I did eventually have a writing group. But my writing group was different than most writing groups—we didn’t workshop, we didn’t exchange work. In Oakland, six years ago, I formed this group of all women of color writers. We met once a month for a potluck at one of our homes, and we would just talk and chat and just enjoy being in a space with POC writers. We would share resources or talk about issues we were having with our work, brainstorm places to submit, residencies to apply to. The focus was not on critique, but on support. It was all about networking and just being really encouraging to each other, sometimes we’d pull tarot cards—it was just fun, supportive, and helpful. Especially because it takes so many years to write a book—so long to write it, and then so long to find an agent, and then a publisher, and you keep thinking no one wants it. There is so much rejection, and it takes so much determination. Having that group of women surround me made me feel like we were all in it together. I needed people to tell me to just keep going and not give up. And any time one of us got an agent, or placed an essay, or sold a book, it felt like a win for all of us. Being part of each other’s process gave me so much strength.

EB: I love that. That’s so important. One of my writing groups doesn’t actually exchange writing at all; we meet once a week for drinks at a bar in Harvard Square and just vent about our frustrations with what we are working on or the publishing industry or whatever snobby conference rejected our proposals, and it just makes me feel so much less alone. Fortified that we are all in it together. I just need people telling me to keep going.

MV: Totally. I didn’t need more feedback—honestly, I’d just finished my MFA and I was sort of workshopped out. I didn’t want a critique. I didn’t want more feedback. Unless it was from my agent or my editor, someone who would help move the work forward. At that point, I didn’t want too many hands in my book. But I wanted someone to tell me not to give up.

EB: I get that. Workshopping can be so overwhelming sometimes.

MV: And also really not helpful!

EB: Ha, so true. So, is that the most challenging part of writing nonfiction for you? The motivating yourself to keep going? What about the most rewarding part?

MV: I feel like I haven’t gotten to the most rewarding part yet, because it’s not out yet. [EDITOR’S NOTE: E.B. and Melissa spoke in April, and Melissa’s book was published in July.] I hope this book means something to people. That would be the reward, for sure.

But the hardest thing is definitely hurting people. I’ve broken a lot of hearts, and I’m lucky because my parents still love me. Honestly, they were the last people in my family to read the book. And I know I hurt them.

EB: Oof, that’s hard.

MV: In a way, it’s very freeing now that they’ve read it. We can all move on. But I know that they’re heartbroken about the way they were characterized.

EB: I actually wanted to ask about that—how do you approach writing about people you love? Did you let your family read things ahead of time? Did you give them veto power? Or did you just say: here is what is getting published, take it or leave it.

MV: I was more the latter. While writing the book, I was battling so much self-doubt all the time. Can I do this? Will this ever happen? Am I good enough to finish this? Does this matter? Will this matter to anyone? It was already so hard to write the book, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it if I let people in to have veto power over anything. Writing the book was a sacred private space for me that I didn’t really want to let my family in on, though I did let my siblings read parts of it as I was writing. I’d sometimes finish a chapter I was particularly proud of and send it to them, and then they’d write back with all the things I got wrong and the stuff they claimed they never said, and finally I told them, okay, you can read it, but I don’t want a critique, only praise.

EB: Ha, yes, sometimes you just want someone to say, wow, look at all the words you wrote!

MV: With my parents, I waited until the last minute to show them anything. I sent them the galley to read, because then I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make any changes. And I was terrified. Up until that moment, because of the title of the book, I think my dad thought I was writing something about landscaping and our family’s gardening legacy. He had no clue what he was getting into. Even though he has read essays I’ve written and knows I don’t write about horticulture!

EB: That’s so hard.

MV: Yeah. But I just needed to say what I had to say and then share it.

EB: Well, I hope the rewarding part makes up for makes up for that.

MV: Thanks.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?

MV: This is one of my favorite quotes of all times. It’s not nonfiction, but it’s truth. From Beloved by Toni Morrison:

No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver–love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.