The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #83: Bridgett M. Davis

"This memoir explores the special bond of sisterhood, but also what it means to live and die as a Black woman in America—how the persistent effects of racism shortened Rita’s life."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 83rd installment, featuring Bridgett M. Davis, author most recently of Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy. -Sari Botton

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Bridgett M. Davis. Photograph by Nina Subin.

Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the memoir, Love, Rita, to be published by Harper Books on March 11, 2025. Her first memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, NBC News and Parade Magazine, and featured as a clue on the quiz show Jeopardy! The upcoming film adaptation will be produced by Plan B Entertainment and released by Searchlight Pictures. Davis is writer/director of the 1996 award-winning feature film Naked Acts, newly restored and released to critical acclaim, screening in theaters across the US and globally and now available on DVD, Blu-Ray and streaming. She is also author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow, named a Best Book of 2014 by The San Francisco Chronicle, and Shifting Through Neutral, shortlisted for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. Davis is Professor Emerita in the journalism department at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she has taught creative, narrative and film writing. Her essays have appeared most recently in The New York Times, the LA Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia Journalism School, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her website at www.bridgettdavis.com.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I’m 64, and I’ve been writing since I was a child, keeping a diary. I wrote my first short story in junior high school, after a spring visit to Washington D.C. The first line of that story read: “Percy Porter walked along the street as the smell of cherry blossoms permeated the air.” From that moment, when I understood I could take lived experience and craft it into narrative, I’ve been doing that ever since, across genres—fiction, journalism, screenwriting, essays and now, memoir.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

My latest book is Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy, and it will publish in one week, on March 11^th.

What number book is this for you?

This is my 4^th book, but I wrote and directed a feature film in the 90s, Naked Acts, and I consider that screenplay a kind of book, in a sense.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

I call this a memoir about my sister, and us as sisters. I write memoir to reveal who others were in my life, and who they were to me.

This book explores the life of my sister Rita, who was four years older, and modeled for me how to live boldly. She was a vivacious woman who, as the first in our family to graduate college, went on to be a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA-holding corporate buyer, and later a popular special-ed teacher. We were best friends until her life was cut short by lupus at age 44. This led me to ask the simple question: Why Rita?

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

This book explores the life of my sister Rita, who was four years older, and modeled for me how to live boldly. She was a vivacious woman who, as the first in our family to graduate college, went on to be a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA-holding corporate buyer, and later a popular special-ed teacher. We were best friends until her life was cut short by lupus at age 44. This led me to ask the simple question: Why Rita? Using the letters she wrote to me across the years, this memoir explores the special bond of sisterhood, but also what it means to live and die as a Black woman in America—how the persistent effects of racism shortened Rita’s life. This is ultimately an homage to my sister, a love letter.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

I wanted to become a writer when, at 10 years old, I read Louise Meriwether’s seminal novel, Daddy Was A Number Runner. I wanted to write novels like that. But I actually became a writer, concretely, when the first article I wrote was published in my high school newspaper and I saw my byline in print. That was intoxicating, and I committed right then to becoming a reporter.

Journalism gave me writing skills, purpose and courage; but eventually, I went back to my first love, fiction, and wrote my first novel, Shifting Through Neutral. It took a while. I was 44 by then and had been a journalist for many years but had also spent a decade in my 30s as a screenwriter and director. I brought all those experiences as a writer to my decision, at age 50, to begin working on my first memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis.

That book—about my mother giving us a middle-class life by running an underground lottery business known as the Numbers—was a nine-year odyssey from inception to publication. Seeing the way the story about my mom was embraced so fully gave me courage to tell this story, about my sister Rita.

And so four years ago, on what would’ve been Rita’s 65^th birthday, I committed to writing Love, Rita. I’d begun to understand the toll that racism takes on Black folks’ lives, how it manifests in our health struggles, and that got me thinking about all that Rita had gone through as a lupus sufferer. I decided to use her life as a lens to examine the impact of inherited and societal trauma on Black people, alongside my personal memories of my sister as this unforgettable woman. And now Love, Rita is about to be out in the world!

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

So much about writing this book was hard! The hardest of all was reliving the declining years of my sister’s health and looking the truth square in the face – the fact that I couldn’t save her. Equally hard was telling the stories of all my siblings’ early deaths. This had been a dark secret in my life, the fact that I’ve suffered successive losses and tragedies, lost my entire origin family to death by age 40. It was also hard to talk to the people in Rita’s life who’d loved her, because their buried emotions rose to the surface thanks to my asking them about her after all these years. Learning new, heartbreaking details about her life that I’d never known before was hard too. Very hard.

Getting the book published wasn’t hard, in the sense that on the strength of my first memoir, I was a proven memoirist. Also, my new young editor at Harper, Adenike Olanrewaju, has sisters, and she understood the emotional value of the story right away. Also, I sold Love, Rita in 2022, when the culture was still living with the effects of 2020’s racial reckoning, and there was receptivity to acknowledging the ways systemic racism affects Black life. Now that the book is entering the world in a very different cultural climate, I feel that discourse around the issues it raises is as necessary as ever.

Check out Bridgett M. Davis’s earlier memoir…

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?

I used real names by and large, except with one person from my sister’s past, who asked that I use a pseudonym; I also used a pseudonym for a man who engaged in racist behavior towards my sister, but that was at the insistence of the publisher’s lawyer. I wanted to call him out by name! I read a few passages to certain people, to get their approval when I felt the material was sensitive. I didn’t want anyone surprised. But I only made changes for accuracy.

Four years ago, on what would’ve been Rita’s 65^th birthday, I committed to writing Love, Rita. I’d begun to understand the toll that racism takes on Black folks’ lives, how it manifests in our health struggles, and that got me thinking about all that Rita had gone through as a lupus sufferer. I decided to use her life as a lens to examine the impact of inherited and societal trauma on Black people, alongside my personal memories of my sister as this unforgettable woman.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

Linda Villarosa’s book Under The Skin, which looks at all the ways Black people “live sicker and die quicker” than whites, was a foundational text for me. And for bravery, I turned to poet Natasha Trethewey’s extraordinary memoir, Memorial Drive, which tells the story of her mother’s murder at the hands of her ex-husband, and among other things includes official documents and her mother’s written words in the text. It’s a poetic masterpiece. I also took inspiration from Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, which is a painful yet beautiful elegy to the men in her life that died young.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

My advice is to start an inspiration folder—on your computer, in your Notes app, in a physical file—and add to it any and all text and images that speak to what you want to say. It’s a way to be in conversation with those ideas that align with your intention. And then, read a ton of memoirs, widely, to steep yourself in the genre. You can then read memoirs that seem in some way similar to the one you want to write—in approach, in subject matter, in style. Also, I’m big on research, and cultural context. To write about a life, you have to understand the world in which that life was lived—the time and the place.

Finally, I believe in writing the fun parts first. Write what you want to write, what excites you and comes easily and conjures good memories. I loved recreating on the page all the special times my sister and I shared. That buttressed me for what I knew I’d have to write later. I did not start with the hard parts first. No way. I had to build up my courage, and write my way to that.

What do you love about writing? 

I love that writing gives my life both purpose and joy. I love that creating narrative around what puzzles or excites or saddens me gives it both shape and meaning. I love that writing allows me to honor my loved ones, and offer them a kind of immortality, because written words live on. I love that my writing creates another record of Black life, one that is a corrective for what’s been erased or silenced or ignored. It puts these unique human beings’ lives on the record.

But most of all I love that writing allows me to be in an active relationship again with my loved ones, as a way to better understand who they were to me, and who I am because of them.

What frustrates you about writing?

For the longest time, what frustrated me about writing was feeling as though I had to do it, to quote Toni Morrison, “in the margins of my life.” With a full-time job, children, a marriage—across the decades it always felt as though I couldn’t center the writing, that I never had all the time I wanted to devote to it. That frustration has lifted, since I stopped teaching as a college professor. Now, I am a full-time writer, and it’s delicious.

What about writing surprises you?

I’m still surprised by the ways that writing is discovery. I learn so much about the connectedness of life, about myself, about the people I write about, about my own capacity as a writer. Also, my understanding of human nature flourishes through the writing process; my empathy swells. Also, there’s something alchemical about creating narrative, this thing that didn’t exist before and now does. As I write one word after the other, it feels like a drumbeat towards eternity.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times? 

My writing practice absolutely involves a routine: I wake every morning, meditate, make a cup of coffee, sit at my computer, and write. I love having the quiet of the morning to myself. The time I get up varies somewhat—when my children were younger, it might be 4:30 or 5 am; sometimes back in the day I could only grab 20 minutes to write; but other days I’d get an entire glorious hour.

Now that my children are young adults, I rise closer to 6 or 6:30 in the morning, and if I choose, I can write for two hours or three hours. Regardless, the ritual remains. It has saved me. I tell younger writers that you can write an entire book in 20-minute intervals, if you show up to the work on a daily basis. I know because I’ve done it, and I’m four books in. Writing for the long haul is about rhythm, and in my opinion, you can’t create that rhythm if you don’t write regularly.

For the longest time, what frustrated me about writing was feeling as though I had to do it, to quote Toni Morrison, “in the margins of my life.” With a full-time job, children, a marriage—across the decades it always felt as though I couldn’t center the writing, that I never had all the time I wanted to devote to it. That frustration has lifted, since I stopped teaching as a college professor. Now, I am a full-time writer, and it’s delicious.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I love collage art, and I create collages for fun. I see a direct correlation, because I think of my writing and my writing process as collage – grabbing influences, examples, ideas, memories, quotes and facts from myriad places and juxtaposing them against one another to create something new and meaningful. After all the cerebral work of writing, I relish engaging in something so tactile. And yet, collaging is also a form of writing for me. Sometimes I actually use the physical images and archival materials and texts that are part of my book projects in a given collage, as another way to work out ideas. It’s all narrative storytelling.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I’ve begun a new book, a memoir that’s as light and fun as Love, Rita is deep and serious. This new book is about the 90s version of the Harlem Renaissance—Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where I came-of-age artistically, making a guerilla-style indie film, and also falling in love. What How I Became Hettie Jones did for 1950s Greenwich Village with its Beat poets and painters and jazz musicians, I hope to do for 1990s Fort Greene—with its rich Black artistic scene as the backdrop for the great love story of my life.

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.