It’s New York City in 1991, and Dionne Daphne — the protagonist of Mara Brock Akil’s novel, The Revelation of Dionne Daphne, out from Penguin Random House on June 30 — is trying to have it all, the way the magazines tell her she can. She has a prestigious job at Essence magazine, where she’s working toward a big promotion, and dreams of a good-on-paper future with her good-on-paper boyfriend. But one day, life falls apart: Instead of proposing, Dionne’s boyfriend breaks up with her; weeks later, he shows up at her door and tells her he’s HIV-positive. Reeling, Dionne finds her way to a clinic for a test. The novel follows her journey through the two-week wait for results as she compiles the mandatory list of former sexual partners and faces a truth she has long outrun — that her first sexual experience was one of molestation at the hands of an adult she trusted to protect her.
The event was inspired by an experience in Brock Akil’s own childhood. A first-time novelist you may know from her decadeslong career as one of television’s most storied showrunners and producers, Brock Akil has centered Black stories and casts from Girlfriends to The Game to Love Is ___ and countless others, including the recent Peabody-winning Netflix series Forever. Brock Akil has always been telling the truth through fiction, she tells me when we meet up at a red-sauce joint on the Upper West Side one sunny June afternoon. She hopes this truth, one of confronting the past instead of outrunning it, will help others lay down their own burdens.
