Satire and Sensitivity

What happens when editors become the subject of satire? Zakiya Dalila Harris, who began her career as an assistant editor at Knopf Doubleday, is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative fiction whose protagonist, Nella, is the only black girl, or OBG, to work as an assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint—until one day she notices a colleague she hadn’t before. Nella unearths a conspiracy to brainwash black writers into upholding white ideals of respectability in art and at work. The Other Black Girl was a New York Times best seller and was adapted into a ten-episode series on Hulu—cowritten and coproduced by Harris—that I binged on a rainy day last fall. Our wide-ranging conversation looks at publishing, race, and what has, and hasn’t, changed since she published her novel in 2021.

Merve Emre: Tell us how you got to be an assistant editor at Doubleday, where the ideas for The Other Black Girl started to germinate.

Zakiya Dalila Harris: Publishing was not my planned career path. I knew early on I wanted to be a writer. My dad is a writer. My older sister is a writer. So that was the dream. I went to UNC Chapel Hill. I studied English literature and minored in creative writing. I thought about publishing only later on, when I graduated from UNC, because it’s hard to become a writer, right? Everyone dreams of writing the next big thing. You imagine someone’s going to want to buy your idea, but you start to realize there are a lot of hoops to jump through.

I’ve always really enjoyed the pen-on-the-page feeling, though. As a kid, when I would write stories, I wrote them in my notebook first, then typed them up, then printed them out and edited them. There’s something that always appealed to me about that feeling.

After UNC, I went straight to grad school. I got into the New School, where I studied nonfiction writing and fell in love with it. I started writing a lot of personal essays about myself and my experiences growing up. I had gone to a public school that was, at the time, mostly white students. This was like 1997 and 1998, so it was a very different landscape, and conversations about race were very different. I feel like young people now are a lot more aware of it than I was. At the New School, I started writing these essays about my relationship with my hair and my relationship with my friends, how we talked about race and how we didn’t talk about race.

I had a professor my second year at the New School, Hettie Jones. She just passed away. She was married to Amira Baraka when he was still LeRoi Jones. First of all, she was just a phenomenal lady. She was really big in the Greenwich Village Beat writers scene—in the Fifties she and Baraka founded the literary magazine Yugen, and she was also an activist. I remember the class I took with her was devoted to writing about activism. She said to me once, “You know, your writing is so clean. I never need to edit it.” That was one of the best compliments I could have heard, because, again, I just love the act of editing, whether it’s my own words or someone else’s. She asked if I had ever thought about working in book publishing. I told her how I had applied for multiple internships while I was at UNC—I had thought it would be easy to do, but it turns out it is very, very hard to get a job in publishing, almost impossible, if you don’t know anyone, which I didn’t at the time. But Hettie knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. She has black children, and since I am a woman of color, she was like, You are my baby now, and so I’m gonna try to help and feed your name into the system.

I did an informational interview, which is mostly just to make sure you’re serious. I got an e-mail later that summer that I was going to have an interview at Knopf Doubleday. I was like, Whoa, this actually worked. But it also sucks that this is how it had to happen. That’s been in the back of my mind throughout my career when helping people make connections and when talking about my journey, especially with young people of color. I started out as an editorial assistant to one nonfiction editor and one fiction editor, so I had the best of both worlds. I got to see how proposals were submitted on the nonfiction side, which is very different from the fiction side.

It’s funny to hear you speak so happily about this experience because your novel, The Other Black Girl, is quite scathing about publishing. Would you read the first few pages for us?

I was the only black girl working at Knopf Doubleday. That experience in itself is highlighted in the book. I’m going to read from part one, chapter one, which is from the perspective of the main character, Nella Rogers. She was inspired by my experiences, but not all of them.

July 23, 2018

Wagner Books

Midtown, Manhattan

The first sign was the smell of cocoa butter.

When it initially crept around the wall of her cubicle, Nella was too busy filing a stack of pages at her desk, aligning each and every one so that the manuscript was perfectly flush. She was so intent on completing this task—Vera Parini needed everything to be flush, always—that she had the nerve to ignore the smell. Only when it inched up her nostrils and latched onto a deep part of her brain did she stop what she was doing and lift her head with sudden interest.

It wasn’t the scent alone that gave her pause. Nella Rogers was used to all kinds of uninvited smells creeping into her cubicle—usually terrible ones. Since she was merely an editorial assistant at Wagner Books, she had no private office, and therefore no walls or windows. She and the other open-space assistants were at the mercy of a hard-boiled egg or the passing of gas; they were often left to suffer the consequences for what felt like an hour afterward.

Adjusting to such close proximity had been so difficult for Nella during her first few weeks at Wagner that she’d practiced breathing through her mouth even when it wasn’t called for, like when she was deciding between granolas at the grocery store, or when she was having sex with her boyfriend, Owen. After about three months of failed self-training, she had broken down and purchased a lavender reed diffuser that had the words JUST BREATHE scrawled across its front in gold cursive letters. Its home was the far corner of her desk, where it sat just beneath the first edition of Kindred that Owen had given her shortly after they started dating.

Nella eyed the gold foil letters and frowned. Could it have been the lavender diffuser she smelled? She inhaled again, craning her neck upward so that all she could see were the gray and white tiles that lined the ceiling. No. She’d been correct—that was cocoa butter, alright. And it wasn’t just any cocoa butter. It was Brown Buttah, her favorite brand of hair grease.

Nella looked around. Once she was sure the coast was clear, she stuck her hand into her thick black hair and pulled a piece of it as close to her nose as she could. She’d been proudly growing an afro over the last three years, but the strand still landed unsatisfyingly between her nose and her cheek. Nonetheless, it fell close enough to tell her that the Brown Buttah smell wasn’t coming from her own hair. What she was smelling was fresh, a coat applied within the last hour or so, she guessed.

This meant one of two things: One of her white colleagues had started using Brown Buttah. Or—more likely, since she was pretty sure none of them had accidentally stumbled into the natural hair care aisle—there was another Black girl on the thirteenth floor.

While reading about the show, I discovered the acronym OBG, which does double duty as “Other Black Girl” and “Only Black Girl.” Why did you, the only black girl working at Knopf Doubleday, decide to leave publishing and write this novel?

That scene is the first I ever wrote of this book, and I handwrote it in my cubicle at Penguin Random House, on either Knopf or Doubleday stationery—I don’t remember which. But I remember the moment vividly, It came from having gotten used to being “the only black girl,” and being good at being an only. That felt a little gross.

It also came from this kind of noninteraction I had in the bathroom. I was washing my hands, and another black woman came out of the stall. I was like, Who is she? I remember trying to catch her eye and being like, Oh, okay, like, who are you? I was putting out feelers, and I didn’t get any feelers back. I went back to my desk and was really thinking about why I felt so excited about her presence. And because I am who I am, I thought she could’ve been a robot. She could have been planted here! That’s not a spoiler for the book, by the way. But I remember texting my friend and telling her my idea, and she said, “Write it!” So, I started writing it on my office stationery.

The book started out with that speculative idea, but then I thought, “What if there’s a conspiracy to get black girls in the publishing space?” I’m a big Twilight Zone fan and a Jordan Peele fan—I’m into the ways we can talk about social conventions and expectations within the workplace and within the black diaspora. I set out to think about the publishing industry but also about how any kind of corporate industry can break people down who are not the norm, who are not white, who are not heterosexual men. I was also, as I kept writing, asking questions, even of myself, that I hadn’t heard other people necessarily asking. And now I have. When I finally read Percival Everett’s Erasure for the first time, I thought, “Oh my God, he wrote an entire book within a book, twenty-plus years ago, that speaks to very similar issues with publishing as mine does.”

For people who haven’t read the book, the only black girl is Nella and the other black girl, whose Brown Buttah she smells, is Hazel, and the novel unfolds as a conspiracy to assimilate black women into white, liberal cultural spaces. You said that you were used to being an “only,” and that there’s something gross about that. Talk to me about what’s gross about being the only, and how those feelings of disgust play into this novel.

For me, being likable has always been important. As I got older, I wondered how much being a black girl in these white spaces made me feel like I needed to be likable. I started to pull apart the very essence of who I thought I was. As a young person, I also got a lot of, “You sound like a white girl. You talk like a white girl. Why are you studying so much?” I didn’t have really good black friends until college, and why was that?

Being an author has been a joy because I’ve met other black authors who have also been pigeonholed in their own ways. I feel like this book helped me be okay with the fact that I grew up listening to Rod Stewart with my mom and the Temptations with my dad. I’m a combination of my parents and where they’re from as well. So I was able to take a more holistic approach to my life, enjoy who I am and my quirks.

I’m glad that you brought up Percival Everett’s Erasure. Usually satire begins with a strong idea: walking into a bathroom, trying to catch a woman’s eye, and wondering if she’s a robot. But the execution can be difficult. One of the risks, I think, is that satire actually gets too close to life; it can feel too on the nose. There are savage moments in the book when, for instance, Nella’s white boss describes her diversity meetings as “extracurricular,” or when Nella is brought in by her boss to comment on a manuscript that has a completely ridiculous black character. How do you walk the line in satire between fiction and reality?

I’ve been thinking about this more with my second book, as I’ve had to really unpack the first novel in a public way that I’ve never unpacked any of my writing, or my life, before. With The Other Black Girl, I really was just writing from my soul, telling the jokes that I would make with my black friends and my white friends about the conversations we overheard at work. I should add that I did not have as terrible a time, at all, as Nella did in this book. I had great bosses who nurtured my career and gave me opportunities that a lot of other editorial assistants did not necessarily get. If you have a boss who really is looking out for you and wants you to succeed, it’s a lot easier. But the fact was that I was the only black person in editorial meetings, and when we’re talking about, for example, a famous black celebrity memoir, and none of the older white people at the table know who this celebrity is, it could be very frustrating. We don’t necessarily want people editing books if they don’t know who the writer is, but still. It was like we were in a bubble.

Someone, who I did not report to, once asked me to review something to make sure it wasn’t problematic. I thought that was hilarious, because I hadn’t necessarily felt like my race was acknowledged up to that point. But it also made me think, Oh, okay, so you are clocking this? So then, wait, why are you not bothered by the fact that we’re not actually hiring more people of color? The people of color working there were often in tech or security, not in editorial or publicity. If you don’t have space to help nurture younger people, they’re not going to stay—and that’s unfortunately what’s happening.

The editorial assistant in the book is used a little bit like a sensitivity reader. One of the experiences the book reflects is how people are tokenized by being assigned to read in particular ways. They’re asked to read for potential offenses, rather than delight or accuracy or anything else.

Nella has feelings about sensitivity readers. I also have feelings about them as a concept. When they’re brought on in good faith, I think they can be great. But assuming one person can speak for a mass of people is wild to me. I have very different opinions from black female friends who grew up similarly to how I did. I feel like I had a sort of quiet rage from just existing, and I put it into the book. Afterward, I was like, Oh, I was doing satire. But a lot of it is very serious—and a lot of it, especially now, is not as crazy as it seemed then.

I’m curious how this book—and I want to talk about the TV adaptation, too—feels different to you in 2025 than when you started writing it in 2019.

I wrote The Other Black Girl before 2020, and when I was talking about the book with Hulu and my editor, it was in the middle of June 2020. I was editing the book to try and capture how I was feeling. There’s a moment when Nella is thinking about how she has to go to work after seeing yet another instance of police brutality—that was my life. I felt that I needed to watch the three-minute video of Philando Castile’s murder, and then I went to work—I was working at a pie shop at the time—and people were like, “How are you?” You can’t live angry all the time, or at least I can’t, because it’s exhausting. That disconnect was something that I felt even then. It’s something that’s been felt years and years and years before me, in ways that James Baldwin and many other writers have articulated.

But then we were writing the TV show, and we had to update it. When it came out in 2023, the landscape was different than 2020. There was a period of time when talking about microaggressions and racism felt like “old news.” I even felt personally fatigued talking about it. But now I do feel it’s important again. It was never not important, but as an artist, I was ready to move on. In my second book, there are no white people.

It’s interesting that you say that you are not the sort of person who can be angry all the time, because that’s what your novel is about: the cost of being angry all the time. We might want individuals to be angry all the time to bring about radical political change, but sometimes people are exhausted and would rather just assimilate.

Absolutely. I was really excited about the show in part because we get more into Hazel. In the book, she was really a representation of the publishing machine, the corporate machine, if you will. But in the show, she’s not just a symbol of assimilation, she has more of a life, and you see why she does the things she does. For me, there are days when I wish I could just take a bath in magical hair grease and make everything different—but we can’t be sleepy all the time, either. I’m quoting one of my characters, Jesse, who says, “Be woke, but still keep some of that sleep in your eyes, too.” I do think it’s important, and that’s always been part of the movement. People have to go to work, do their job, feed their families, and take care of their kids. Not everyone can engage the same way, because of privilege and class and education. We don’t have equal access to those things. We can’t expect everyone to be angry all the time, because not everyone can afford to be.

There are a lot of arguments among your readers about exactly that: What do we do about the fact that not everybody can be political in the ways that we want them to be political? The book and the TV show have two different endings that both speak exactly to this question. I want to talk about the process of making the book into a show, of being the executive producer and being in the writers’ room. How do you take a novel and turn it into a ten-episode comedy series?

When I sold the book to my publisher, my agent connected me with TV agents who brought the book to producers and potential cowriters who might be interested in the story. I had a lot of creative calls where we just talked about what an adaptation would look like. Again, because it was 2020, the book was still changing. We had to anticipate what people would be tired of seeing and get a little creative about the way we portrayed certain things; it’s boring to watch a white person be awful all the time. That’s not how the world is.

I eventually ended up working with Rashida Jones, my cocreator. She helped me learn how to write for TV, because I never had done before. From there, we hit the ground running. We knew we’d be with Hulu. We also knew we wanted it to be funny, because I think the book has some funny parts, and it’s also just important to have humor in these kinds of conversations. When I’m complaining with my black friends about something, we’re laughing, we’re making jokes. The trick was finding that balance between comedy and horror, and figuring out what kind of workplace show we wanted it to be. There are a lot of those out there, obviously, and we wanted it to feel like its own thing.

Then we put together a room with lots of comedy writers, mostly black women. It was wonderful to have that, because we started by just talking about our own experiences in the workplace, our own experiences with OBGs, and also what we wanted to see adapted. Almost overwhelmingly, it was the hair-party scene, which is a pivotal moment both in the show and in the book.

Can you describe that scene?

There’s a point when Nella has figured out there’s something up with Hazel. I mean, it’s pretty obvious from the jump that there’s something up with Hazel, but Nella and her best friend, Malaika, decide to go to a hair party at Hazel’s fancy brownstone in Brooklyn, and it’s creepy. In the show, there’s some Anita Baker playing. It’s a fun scene. But it also was important to me because so much of this book is about hair, loving your hair—it’s a background character, if you will. In the show, we got to have this beautiful scene where Nella’s hair is being done by Hazel, and you see her as a kid with the kind of relationship you have with your mom when she’s doing your hair and braiding it. That’s something that I remember very fondly from childhood, my mom’s hands.

What was something about editing you could show on the screen that you felt like you couldn’t necessarily depict in writing?

We added a storyline that’s not in the book, which is a tension between two characters, Kendra Ray and Diana. Diana, in the book and in the show, is a writer. She’s like an Oprah–meets–Terry McMillan character. She writes commercial books, but her big break came in the Eighties when she wrote a best seller called Burning Heart. Kendra Ray is her childhood friend and also her editor. Getting to show the relationship between a black writer and a black editor, which is very rare even to this day in publishing, was really special.

For the show, we talked about why their relationship becomes fraught. We showed the ways in which politics, specifically in the publishing house, affects their relationship. A lot of it had to do with the editing of Burning Heart and the conversations between Kendra and Diana. How hard does the book go? How violent do they want it to be? How do they want this book to end? We show how they respond to the commercial pressure of an Oprah’s Book Club pick needing to be very nice and tidy and cleaned up. Kendra Ray wants the book to be serious and tough, and to actually speak to the black experience. It’s a conversation about pushing an agenda versus playing along to get along. She and Diana disagree about that. In the show, we get to hear the women’s voices talking about the edits on the manuscript. In the book, we don’t really see that because it’s not as easy to depict.

On the other hand, I really wanted to adapt the scene that I read earlier from the beginning of chapter one, of Nella smelling the grease. We tried. We wrote that into the pilot, and she’s like smelling the air, then she smells herself, but it just looked really bad. You couldn’t tell what she was doing. It ended up getting cut. I thought about it differently while writing the script versus actually filming it. I think the back-and-forth of translating things for the screen has helped my novel writing. And it’s made it harder in a lot of ways. Now I imagine sets, actual people moving around a stage, in a way that’s sometimes frustrating, but it’s a very symbiotic thing.

I think about Toni Morrison as that legendary editorial figure who helped many young black women writers publish their first books with Random House. When I was reading your book and watching the show, I couldn’t help but think about how we fantasize about that relationship. I’m wondering if you think about that, too? Your novel feels resistant to those utopian-professional fantasies.

Yeah, resistant, but I hope the validity of that dream still resounds. I thought about Toni Morrison so much while I was working in publishing because at Knopf her name was all over the walls, and I would imagine what it would be like to have her on the floor. I’ve really come to appreciate the older black women that I got to meet in publishing, who are still working in publishing. Every time I meet a black woman editor, I’m like, Oh my god, let’s get a coffee. I want to talk to you and get to know you. Because I didn’t really have that relationship in the same way, and so for me that is important. That means it’s going to be important for Nella. There is this idea of looking back on what you hoped and thought was the golden age, and then realizing it wasn’t that good. I think memory can help us and also sometimes hurt us a little bit, too.