One Nightstand With Lena Waithe

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Lena Waithe is about as busy as it gets. She’s preparing to close out the eighth season of The Chi, with the show surpassing Soul Food as the longest-running Black drama on cable. Her podcast, Legacy Talk, just wrapped Season 2 with the appearance of Phylicia Rashad, and she’s also working heavily in the theater space, with a play she wrote and is also starring in, Trinity, premiering in Baltimore in February, and several others she’s produced debuting in the coming months.

And then there’s her secret project.

“I’m working on this movie for myself and Issa Rae,” she says. “It’s a really cool idea about us being friends and having a bit of a friendship breakup, and it’s really funny and silly. I was supposed to be writing beats for her, but I ultimately just started writing the script, so I may just send that to her at some point. It was like trying to write the beats was getting to be too difficult and so I just started working on the script.”

“She and I [were] Zooming and talking and figuring out how it could be, and right now I’m being lazy — the characters’ names [are] Lena and Issa, I’m not even being that imaginative about it. They’re thinly-veiled versions of ourselves,” she says. I ask if they plan to star in it too. “Yeah, we want to.” She pauses. “So this is definitely an exclusive. Issa’s going to be like, ‘Oh sh*t, well now we got to do it.’”

Beyond the stage and screen, Waithe also finds inspiration in the stories she reads. Discover her favorite books below.

Jeremy O. Harris recommended Waithe’s first pick, This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson. “Even though it’s very much a story about her relationship with her mother and about her mother, what it’s saying is who you come from has a lot to say about who you ultimately become, and I think that was something that I really enjoyed,” says Waithe of the memoir. “Oftentimes books are called ‘brave’ or ‘noble’ or ‘courageous,’ but the word I would really [use] to describe the book [is] ‘human.’”

She continues: “It is a very universal story, even if you don’t have a strained relationship with your mother, even if you don’t happen to be a Black woman walking through the world. I think what’s great about books or art of any kind is that you see yourself in people that you might not ever meet.”

Her second book, Think You’ll Be Happy by Nicole Avant, continues in its exploration of the grief felt by a child at the death of their mother. “I know who her parents are and I kind of know her story, but you don’t really know someone’s story until they write it down and share things with you,” Waithe says of Avant’s memoir. “And so reading the book about her mother, who she lost tragically, wasn’t what I was expecting. It was probably one of the most optimistic [things I’ve read] — just joyful and light and love.”

The book also prompted some reflection for Waithe. “I lost my dad suddenly when I was a teenager, but I didn’t know the circumstances around what happened until really last year, and the crazy thing is I learned later that he was killed tragically, and I didn’t find that out until after reading Nicole’s book,” she says. “But there’s something really interesting about that experience of losing a parent also at the hands of someone else. Then you’re thinking about that and sort of trying to process a lot of things, and also my process was a little delayed because I found that out later.”

Waithe was particularly struck by Avant’s “grace” in processing her trauma. “I don’t know if she just inherited it or obviously it was taught to her to have grace for people and to treat everyone with kindness and respect,” she says. “Your parents are the ones that give you the rule book, and you can either follow it, you can take what works for you and leave the rest, or you can deviate completely. And I think what Nicole is speaking about is really wanting to live up to the bar that her mother set. It was pretty high.”

Her third book, Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell, tells the story of a world event where all white people walk into water and drown, leaving those left behind to imagine a society free of whiteness. “The book can be very whimsical in moments, but also very grounded in a form of reality as well,” she says. “It’s also imagining a future that isn’t real but feels very sort of true to our experiences. He’s imagining a very unique world, which is very much a reckoning, I think.

“The book does a really beautiful job of trying to understand where the source of anger comes from and then sort of facing that and staring that in the face, rather than succumbing to it,” she adds. “[One of] the things he just articulated in a beautiful poetic way in the book is that: Who are you when all the excuses are gone?”

Her final book is Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr., a memoir on which Davis, Jr. personally collaborated. “Sammy was a child prodigy and came up in a time where Black people were seen — and still in our society, continue to be seen — as less than, and because he was so extraordinary, he really shifted culture and society,” she says. “He dealt with so much and carried so much for the Black community, for the industry, for himself, even when it came to who he fell in love with. It was not a popular thing for a Black man to be dating a white woman. Still, that is something that is very fraught. He wasn’t afraid to say that love is not political — love is guttural, it is spiritual. And that was a big deal for him to do that at that time. I found this to be very admirable — that he wasn’t afraid of what someone would think.”

Waithe, in fact, wrote a biopic of Davis, Jr. based on his daughter’s own account of the man, which she is now adapting into a stage play. “You don’t have Usher, you don’t have Michael Jackson, you don’t have Eddie Murphy,” she says. “Like half of these people that we love and we know they would not exist in the way they do if Sammy Davis, Jr. did not exist in the way in which he did.”

Watch the full interview below.