Chris Sparks
Creative Nonfiction
11 October 2011
A Matter of Misconception
One could say that Denene Millner’s career is a story of misconceptions. From her childhood to her more recent publications, Denene’s work had been questioned, misunderstood, and disregarded with or without proper evidence. She writes to destroy the misinterpretations of Black life, love and family, but often must defend her works from those who misunderstand them. Her books, while not always the token tales of good deeds and lessons learned, are her attempts to speak to the world on a larger scale.
One of her more well-known works, though its writing is not always attributed to her, is Act Like a Lady, Think Like A Man which has received much criticism for its supposedly anti-feminist views. Millner recalls more than one occasion in which such critics have railed against the principles of the book without even the slightest idea of what lies within its pages. For these people she has, “choice words,” though she hopes that they will come to see that the book offers a “valid and powerful perspective from the man’s point of view.” For Millner and Harvey, the publication’s intention was to give voice to an experience not often discussed. Relationships as a man experiences them. Even in Harvey’s voice, however, she was deliberate in working towards building women and equipping them for what she feels they need to win the relationship game without taking on a demeaning tone. “There was no way I would sit there and let any word of mine disrespect women,” she said. This is her creed in all of her books. To show that women are multifaceted, able and intelligent while destroying the low expectations that others and, in some cases, women themselves have set. Millner hopes her characters proclaim that, as Black women, “our backgrounds and our experiences and our thought processes are just as diverse as anyone else’s.”
Her Hotlanta series, three youth fiction books published from 2008 to 2009, creates a sort of character young Black girls almost never get to see in the books they read. Though Hotlanta was commissioned by Alloy Media, Millner and her co-author, Mitzi Miller, set out to use the opportunity to speak “to the livelihood of girls who didn’t necessarily fall into the stereotypes of what everybody thought a young black teenage girl was like.” The characters, hailing from both Buckhead, an upper-middle class area, and the less prosperous West End, serve to combat other perceptions commonly associated with both. The idea that black people are resigned to single-parent homes in the inner city, struggling to pay for school and anything else in life, is meant to be disproved. Sydney and Lauren, the main characters, attend private school, come from an affluent family and have the same hopes and goals as any, far beyond longing for just another meal. Beyond this point, however, the co-authors saw another need. “Fourteen and fifteen year olds, because they couldn’t find images of themselves . . . were reading books that were wholly inappropriate for them . . . books that are sexual and salacious and way above their pay grade.” So, to provide a safer alternative and a positive image for young black women, they created these three books with all the same elements of other books, such as Gossip Girl, but with a new audience in mind.
Denene Millner has drawn from past experiences and her passions to cross between fiction and nonfiction, dancing from the topics of Black love, family life, parenting and even childhood. She strives to give a voice to those who had none before, to give role models to those growing up with none, and to lend her advice to those in need of it. Whether or not she succeeded in her aims, and how well the task was accomplished, however, is merely a matter of perspective.
