Conversations: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
SYNOPSIS
Emily speaks with author Dolen Perkins-Valdez about her recent novel Take My Hand, based on the 1973 case of the Relf sisters who were forcibly sterilized at a federally-funded health clinic in Montgomery, Alabama.
LISTEN
GUEST
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench, Balm, and most recently Take My Hand. She was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and she was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.
RESOURCES
Mentioned in the episode:
Villarosa, Linda, “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America.” The New York Times Magazine, 2022.
Cain Miller, Claire, Sarah Kliff, and Larry Buchanan, “Childbirth is Deadlier for Black Families Even When They’re Rich, Expansive Study Finds.” The New York Times, 2023.
CREDITS
Hosted by Emily Silverman
Produced by Emily Silverman, Jon Oliver, and Carly Besser
Edited and mixed by Jon Oliver
Original theme music by Yosef Munro with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page
TRANSCRIPT
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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Episode Transcript
Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.
Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman.
As healthcare workers, we have so many amazing tools at our disposal. We have medications, procedures, surgeries, even narratives and data and counseling that we use to help people with their health. But the scary thing is, having these tools means we can also cause way more harm than we ever could have before we entered the profession. We have to be constantly checking ourselves – Are we doing the right thing? Are we helping? Are we harming? – especially when there are so many examples from past and present of medicine inflicting harm on people.
One of those examples is the story of the Relf sisters: two poor black girls in Alabama who were sterilized against their will by a federally funded health clinic in 1973. It's a story I didn't know much about, but it was the inspiration behind today's guest's latest novel, Take My Hand, which explores how something like that could have happened through the eyes of its main character, a black nurse named Civil Townsend. The author is the amazing Dolen Perkins-Valdez, The New York Times bestselling author of two other novels called Wench and Balm. Dolen was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, The Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, and was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in DC with her family. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dolen in which we explored themes of informed consent, the shadow side of good intentions, ambivalence about motherhood, and the role of fiction in creating social change. Before I sat down with Dolen, I asked her to read an excerpt from her amazing book, Take My Hand. Here's Dolen.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
“A year never passes without me thinking of them. India. Erica. Their names are stitched inside every white coat I have ever worn. I tell this story to stitch their names inside your clothes, too. A reminder to never forget. Medicine has taught me, really taught me, to accept the things I cannot change. A difficult-to-swallow serenity prayer. I'm not trying to change the past. I'm telling it in order to lay these ghosts to rest.
You paint feverishly, like Mama. Yet you got the steadfastness of Daddy. Your talents surely defy the notion of a gene pool. I watch you now, home from college, that time after graduation when y'all young people either find your way or slide down the slope of uncertainty. You're sitting on the porch nuzzling the dog, a gray mutt of a pit bull who was once sent to die after snapping at a man's face. In the six years we've had him, he has been more skittish than fierce, as if aware that one wrong look will spell his doom. What I know now is that kind of certainty, dire as it may be, is a gift.
The dog groans as you seek the right place to scratch. I wish someone would scratch me like that. Such exhaustion in my bones. I will be sixty-seven this year, but it's time. I'm ready to work in my yard, feel the damp earth between my fingers, sit with my memories like one of those long-tailed magpies whose wings don't flap like they used to. These days, I wake up and want to roll right back over and go back to sleep for another hour. Yes, it's time.
Two weeks ago, I heard the news that India is very sick. I'm not sure what ails her, but I take this as a sign that it's time to head south. I know what it looks like. No, I am not going to save her. No, I don't harbor some fanciful notion that she'll be the first and last patient of my career. I have prayed about that. Please, Lord, reveal my heart to me.”
Emily Silverman
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, thank you so much for that beautiful reading and for being here with me today.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Thank you for inviting me.
Emily Silverman
So, Dolen, this novel is inspired by a true story. For the audience, briefly, what is the story of the Relf sisters? How did you come across the story? And how did you know that that was going to be your next book?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
So, the Relf sisters were 12 and 14 years old in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. The family was under the care of a social worker, and also under the care of some nurses at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. They had been put on Depo-Provera as a form of birth control along with their older sister Katie Relf, who was 16. And in June of 1973, the nurses came to their door and told their parents, their mother and their daddy, that they were taking them to the hospital for some more shots, for the Depo-Provera shots. The Relf parents were illiterate, and they signed the document with their "X", and the girls were taken to the hospital. And they were given a tubal ligation. They tried to take the older sister, Katie Relf, but she hid under the bed, and so they didn't know that she was home. So it was just the two younger sisters. And when the social worker found out about this, she was outraged and livid.
She went to her husband who was in the military at the time, and he told her to tell his commanding officer. And she went to his commanding officer, who recommended her to a local lawyer, a civil rights lawyer in town, and that was Joe Levin. She went to his office, and he wasn't there. And she waited for him all day. And when he got back there, she told him what had happened. And Joe took the case. It was a landmark case that went to federal court in Washington, DC, and it's considered to be one of the most important cases in terms of the rise of informed consent in the medical profession.
I knew a little bit about it; my daddy had graduated from Tuskegee University, which is just up the road from where this happened, about 30 minutes from Montgomery. And I knew a little bit about it, because I had known about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, my daddy had told me about that and I always had a connection to Alabama. But in 2016, I started to just do some internet searching and saying to myself, "What was that about those girls that were sterilized in Alabama? What was that story?" I had seen them in different documentaries. There were a couple of documentaries on YouTube and different documentaries that you would see and they would flash images of the sisters. And I just couldn't believe it.
When I started to do a little bit more research, I found that it was in every newspaper–every major newspaper of the country. They had been featured on the evening news, they had been in Time magazine. It was major news at the time, and I couldn't believe I had not read about this in school or been taught this in any of my history classes. I mean, I had a Ph.D. and I didn't know anything about this. People write me and say they're outraged, they didn't know about it. And I say, "You know, I didn't either." My first thought was, "Maybe somebody has written a book about this and I just haven't read it," you know. But I couldn't find anything. And then I said, "I have to write this story." But I didn't want to write a journalistic story because I thought, "The Relf sisters are still alive, they can speak for themselves. Joe Levin is still alive, he can speak for himself. The social worker, Jessie Bly, is still alive and she certainly can speak for herself." And I had to find my way into the story. I could not find the nurses who worked at that clinic. And that is where I began with imagining what it would have been like to be a nurse working at that clinic at that time.
Emily Silverman
I want to get into the novel in a second, but first, just a couple more questions about this case, because it's so disturbing, and so gut-wrenching. One of the things that I learned through reading your novel is that this wasn't a one-off case. This wasn't a single situation. Tell us a little bit about the scope of this crime, about forced sterilization in the United States, and how it impacted so many people beyond the Relf sisters.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Well, that was the thing. When Joe Levin first filed this case, he filed it against the clinic in Montgomery, in the court in the Middle District of Alabama. And it named the head nurse, and he began to research and to get phone calls from people all over the country–other lawyers saying that they had clients who were also alleging that this had happened to them. And he discovered that the scope of it was larger than anything he could have imagined. And that's when he dropped the case against The Montgomery Family Planning Clinic and filed it in the US Federal Court against the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare–HEW–and against Weinberger who was the secretary of HEW at the time. He realized that there were tens of thousands of women across the country, largely poor women, largely women of color, but not limited to women of color, many of whom are on public assistance, who had been sterilized, not only at the hands of these federal planning clinics.
I found evidence that there were over 300 of them that existed across the country. But just doctors also were doing it and coercing women, often women who were laboring. A lot of the women...Latina women, for example, who lived in California didn't speak English and they were signing documents that they didn't understand. But also some of the women in the South were illiterate. Some were told that they would lose their federal benefits if they didn't sign it. There were all kinds of different coercion-type practices going on. And some were minors. That's really sort of the sad part about it. I don't know the exact numbers of the minors, but some of the women who were sterilized were definitely minors. In Alabama, I found evidence at this specific clinic of 11 minors.
Emily Silverman
So the case goes to court. And in the novel, you say, there was never a large monetary settlement, never a large payout from the government to right the wrong inflicted upon those girls and that family. So what did change as a result of this case? You mentioned that it impacted the idea of informed consent, but can you talk a little bit about the positive outcomes of the case?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Joe Levin won in the US federal court. He was able to get the injunction that he wanted to get. There was a class action suit, and it prevented this from happening again because it led to the rise of various mechanisms that would assure there would be informed consent. So some of your listeners probably know about the sterilization consent form that institutes a 30-day wait period for women who are on Medicaid, for example. Those are some of the results of Joe Levin's work.
It also led to awareness about the use of, for example, Depo-Provera. There were studies following this that show that a lot of the women who were in those primary Depo-Provera studies were black women, poor women. So there were a lot of things that were brought to light at this time. And this was the year after an AP news reporter broke the news of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which had been going on for four decades. So at the same time that Joe Levin is in Washington, arguing this case, there was also a lawsuit going on in Alabama, on behalf of those victims of that experiment. So this is a moment that really matters. It's a moment when America is reckoning with whether or not the Civil Rights Act and the strides of the Civil Rights Movement have really mattered for poor people, and really illuminates for us the work that remains to be done.
Emily Silverman
You mentioned in the novel that even as recently as 2020, there were cases of forced sterilization happening at the border. And I believe that I saw this in the news in 2020. And as a physician myself, was just astounded by the fact that it was happening and also by the silence in the medical community. And, like you, I don't think was fully aware of this history. I knew about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments but just wasn't quite as clear on this piece of the history. And, so, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have you on today and to bring this book to the attention of the listeners is to raise some more awareness about this because, unfortunately, it seems like these issues haven't fully been repaired.
So I would like to switch a bit, just talking about your creative process as you put together this novel. So, how do you take a nonfiction story like this and translate it to fiction? What kind of primary sources were you working with? I know that you interviewed some of the people involved in the case. And then how do you go about the process of deciding on your narrator and deciding what to keep and what to change and how to turn it into a fictional story?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Well, in my previous two books, I didn't have as many resources and primary source materials. With this book, there were tons of them, because like I said, it was in all the major newspapers. So, the first thing I did was collect the newspaper articles into a file. And the Montgomery Advertiser, the local newspaper, followed it very, very closely. Probably the bulk of what I have is from that newspaper. You know, journalists are really important because they really chronicle these moments. And I think the Montgomery Advertiser did a good job of reporting this one. And so I read all of those articles.
I also, as I mentioned, interviewed Joe Levin–he has a razor-sharp memory. And he was only, at the time that he argued this case, 30 years old. He's now close to 80. So I talked to him and I talked to Mrs. Bly, Jessie Bly, who was the girl's social worker. And I drove around Montgomery. I went through maps of Montgomery because the boundaries of the city were different then than they are now. I talked to someone who had been a patient at that family planning clinic who talked about what it looked like on the inside, what it was like to be there. I talked to someone who was the daughter of a state trooper, who knew about these houses out in Opelika, Alabama, where women could get abortions performed before it was legal. I looked at photographs that existed of the clinic itself. And also looked through the court documents that I could find, anything. I didn't find the court transcripts. But I found the minutes to the subcommittee hearing when the Relf family was brought to DC to testify before Senator Ted Kennedy's subcommittee on health. I had that transcript. So, I had a lot of documents to look through.
And then, what I have to determine is, "What's my window into the story?" And the head nurse, I found an obituary for her, she passed away in either the eighties or the early nineties. So, I knew I couldn't find her. If she had been alive, I would have probably, hopefully, interviewed her. But I couldn't find the names of any of the nurses who worked there. I couldn't find any kind of employee records. She was the only nurse who was named because she was the supervisor. So, I thought, "What might it have been like?" And I found this line in the Montgomery Advertiser where the head nurse defends her actions by saying, "It must have been okay to sterilize the girls because all eight nurses who worked at the clinic were black." And that was astounding to me, because I thought, "How did that happen?" I figured it was probably true, because a lot of these clinics were in the black neighborhoods, because those were the people they were trying to reach. And it made sense to me that they would hire black nurses to try to reach the community, to try to get into the community and gain trust. So that was how I came up with my character of Civil.
I had to figure out what were some of the things I was going to change from the original story, once I had this imagined character. And, so, one of the very first things that determined was that my court case had to happen in Alabama, that I couldn't have my story wandering off into DC. And so when I was talking to Joe, I said, "Joe, could you have argued this case in the Middle District, because the Middle District Federal Court of Alabama is in Montgomery." And I said, "Could you have argued this case here?" And he said, "Yeah, but I didn't." And I said, "But could you have?" And he said, "Yeah, but I didn't." I said, "But could you have?" This is what happens when you talk to a fiction writer.
Emily Silverman
Right.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
And finally, he said, "Yes, yes. I suppose I could have," you know. And so I also made the two girls in my book a little bit younger; I made them 11 and 13, instead of 12 and 14, because I really wanted to emphasize their vulnerability and that they were children. Also, in my book, their mother is dead. In real life, their mother was alive and well. Again, further emphasizing their vulnerability.
The nurse is completely a work of my imagination. Not at all, like the social worker. But the nurse is sort of the informant, the whistleblower, if you will, who goes and finds the lawyer. Also, one of the things that I wanted to get to in the book was how this was connected to other things that were going on, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and distrust over Depo-Provera, being in its sort of early clinical stages. So those are things that I sort of put together in order to create this world.
And I think something that's really important for me to say is that I never interviewed the Relf sisters. I knew that I could contact them through Mrs. Bly, but they're in their 60s. It occurred to me that they are not trying to talk to everybody who digs this story up and wants to write about it, I wanted to leave them alone. And I wanted to let them sort of just live in peace. But they do know about the book. I'm going to be there at the end of this month for a conference and we're giving them awards. There was an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in June of last year, and someone who read it donated money because the sisters were still living in public housing. And they now have a house, they have their own house.
Emily Silverman
Oh, wow.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Yes, someone read that article. A wealthy person from Seattle called The New York Times to reach the reporter, a wonderful journalist by the name of Linda Villarosa, and said, "I want to help. What can I do?" We said, "Well, yeah, they need a house."
Emily Silverman
That's amazing.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
It is amazing.
Emily Silverman
So it sounds like one of the questions that led you into the narrative, one of the central questions, was: What would it have been like to be a nurse working at this clinic and to have this happen, quote-unquote, "on our watch?" And Civil didn't quite know what was going on until after it happened. But there's a couple of other nurse characters, really powerful moments in the story, where they come forward. And you know, one of them says, "I was there," or, "We have Val," for example, who was there during the quote, unquote "consent." And so I'm wondering now that you've gone through this whole process of imagining these characters and feeling into the story, through their perspective, have you come any closer to an answer to that question of like, How could this have happened under their watch?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Well, it's interesting because I write these books, and I wrote this book, hoping to answer that question for myself. My curiosity had to do with how could this have happened under their watch? And through the process of writing it, I felt such connection to Civil and to those nurses. I thought to myself, "I can understand how this happened. I don't agree with it, but I can understand it."
At the beginning of the book, Civil is very much on the same page as her supervising nurse, Mrs. Seager. She recognizes that there is a problem with the statistics of teenage pregnancy. She recognizes that many of these young girls are having babies in impoverished situations. She hopes to give women in the community more reproductive control over their lives, more choices. She has terminated a pregnancy, she doesn't want another woman to be in that situation. So she thinks providing birth control is the way to do it. And, so, she is in some way seduced by the mission of the clinic.
And she's not entirely wrong, she is providing a needed service, women are able to get medical exams, which they normally wouldn't get. But, there's a line and she's walking that line and doesn't realize it. And then when she realizes it, she knows that you have to make a choice, you have to stand on one side or the other. And that is why she demands of her friend, Alicia, who works there, "You must quit. You cannot continue." And she also is fired or quit, it's sort of a gray area. And she understands that we have to be very, very careful when we are doing so-called good deeds for people. And I just thought to myself, "I've been there. I have been the person trying to do good." And it's important for us in those situations, to remind ourselves to listen, to ask questions, to not assume that we know what people want and need from us, to take time to see people as smart even if they aren't literate or even if they aren't experts in our fields. They also have their own intelligence and we have to recognize that and we have to honor that. And she learns that lesson, but it is a very painful lesson for her.
Emily Silverman
Civil had some personality traits that I definitely recognize: this desire to help, to fix, even sometimes to the detriment of examining her own life. And sometimes she runs the risk of coming off as a bit self-righteous or being a savior and we see that in the family that she's helping that they give her pushback. And this idea of good intentions and harm, and how those can be linked. And the other moment that stood out to me is, I think it's Val who says to Civil, "People got to reckon with the hand God dealt them." There's also a moment in the book where Civil's mother, I think it is, tells her to help as much as she can without shaming this family, especially the father. So, how, after writing this book, how do you think about that tension, that desire to help but also wanting to step back and respect and just let things be?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
That's really hard, right? Think about my own feelings about disturbing the Relf sisters. There was a part of me that wanted to make sure they get something out of this because they never got any kind of financial settlement. But there was also a part of me that wanted to leave them alone, and let them live their lives. I chose to leave them alone, right, you know. The journalist for The New York Times chose to go in and write the article and take photographs and make the story public. And I'm so glad she did, because someone read it and did change something in their lives, and it was a big change for them. So, I think, it is a fine line that we all have to navigate for ourselves.
At the end of the day, maybe the solution is just to do so carefully. Don't march in and stomp in our boots, but like, tread and walk respectfully and carefully, and listen and honor, knowing that oftentimes, when we're helping, we're helping from a position of strength. I think it's important even in that position of strength for us to acknowledge our weaknesses and to acknowledge our vulnerabilities and to say to ourselves, "This person could be me. This person really in some ways is me." I mean, I think about that with Civil, she can come off as self-righteous. My agent used this hilarious word–I'm like, "Is that a British word?"–to describe her. She called her "priggish." Have you ever heard that word?
Emily Silverman
Sounds very British.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
She said, “It's like a British word.” And I was like, "That is the most hilarious word." She's like, "She's just so priggish." And I hear that. But I think to myself, "I can be priggish myself." Like when it's something that I really think I know something about, or if it's something that I feel strongly about, I can be self-righteous, certainly. So that's not anything to completely judge her about unless we're willing to acknowledge it in ourselves as well.
So there's a part of me that just thinks, for all of us, myself included, I'm not a healthcare professional. But I teach at a university. And I know that as a teacher, as a professor, I'm in a position of power, and I can't ignore that power dynamic. It exists. No matter how many of them call me by my first name, you know, it still exists. And so what I have to do is just, at all times, know that there are things I know that they don't know, but there are also things they know that I don't know. And that it's an exchange. I'm helping them but they're helping me, too. And I think Civil kind of realizes that over the course of the book. She actually realizes that they've helped her far more than she's helped them. And I think if we go in with that kind of vulnerability and humility, then we can help people. Because the solution isn't to say, "Well, this is an imbalanced power dynamic, and I'm just not going to do anything because no matter what, no good deed goes unpunished. And I don't want to be like the bad person." Like, we can't just opt out, either. So the answer is, to me, is to walk with care.
Emily Silverman
Talk about this book as an exploration of motherhood. There is just so much of that here in this book. We have characters who have had abortions and who have mixed feelings about it. There's a mother who's dead. There's a mother who's emotionally remote and detached. There's biological mothers. There's adoptive mothers. And, of course, we have the girls who have lost the choice or the option. So how, if at all, did this book change your thoughts about motherhood?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
It's so interesting because I feel like even when I'm not trying to write about motherhood, I am. It's just really hard to write the female experience without reckoning with it in some way. It was clearly going to be about motherhood because two of the main characters of the book had had sterilization procedures against their will. But I was actually surprised as the manuscript evolved by all the other permutations that came out. So, for example, at first Civil's mother is just sort of an eccentric, artistic type. And then one day, I'm drafting her and she sleeps all night in the art studio. And I think, "Oh, this is a little bit more than just eccentricity. This is someone that maybe has some mental health issues."
Then, in my early drafts, Civil and Ty had this relationship that was awkward. Something had happened between them, I wasn't quite sure. And then one morning, I woke up, and I thought, "Oh, Civil terminated a pregnancy. That's what has happened between them." And it's also why what happens to the sisters is so devastating for her, because this thing happened, that she doesn't feel regret about, but she feels great shame about. And then the girls don't even have that choice. It also is part of why she's working at the clinic in the first place, because she's terminated this pregnancy and now she wants to help women to make good choices.
Then, I realize, "You know, Civil's kind of ambivalent about being a mother." And so I was also writing about women who had been ambivalent. And over the course of writing this book, I came to terms with my own ambivalences. I was raised in the South, and we didn't even have language to describe that. When I married, my family members, when they got up to toast us, they all wished us a house full of kids. So there wasn't even the language for me to say, "You know, hey, I don't think I want kids." And I had never articulated that to myself, but I married someone who was ambivalent about being a parent. So three years after we get married, we have one child. And then I say, "I don't know, do you want another one?" And he's like, "No, I'm good." And I'm like, "Yeah, no, I'm good," you know? But we still didn't articulate it in that way. And then after seven years, we were getting older, and we thought, "Oh, you know, we really don't want her to be lonely." And we made this decision to have like a second child so that she would have a sibling. But it was clearly not because we wanted to have a second child, but because we want her to have a sibling. But the whole time that I'm pregnant, both times, I hated being pregnant. So, while writing this book, I started to come to terms with my own ambivalences. I mean, I love my kids. And I hope I'm a pretty good mother. And I keep saying when I give these interviews, "Like one day, they'll go back to this and hopefully they'll forgive me." Speaking my truth.
But, it was something that, as I wrote this book, I had to think through for myself that Civil was so much like me in her ambivalences. And because Civil doesn't marry, that ambivalence becomes real in terms of her having a biological child. And then, later, as she gets older, same thing that happened to me, she begins to think, "Oh, well, maybe I do want a child," and she decides to adopt, which, for me, if I had had this conversation with somebody earlier, it's something I would have done because I didn't like the physical act of childbearing. That was something that I just, I didn't like. I didn't want to breastfeed. Everybody was saying, "Oh, you know, you have to breastfeed." My husband was saying, "You should breastfeed." My mother was saying...And I remember the only person, oddly enough, who listened to me was my dad who said, "Well, if she doesn't want to, maybe she shouldn't." You know, he was the only person that kind of heard me on that. So this book thinks about motherhood in a lot of different ways and a lot of different angles and hopefully gives language to all the experiences no matter what it may look like.
Emily Silverman
You know, obviously, this novel is being published at a very important time. We have Roe that's been overturned. There was just a headline on the front page of The New York Times yesterday about maternal mortality in black women compared to white women, just these horrific statistics. Just a lot happening, still, a lot of work to be done. How do you think about fiction and novels as tools for social change? Do you write to persuade and provoke? Do you write because you love art and you're making art for art's sake? Or is it somewhere in between? Or how do you see the role of fiction in this moment?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
It's so interesting because all of this stuff is available online and in newspapers, right? All the statistics about black maternal mortality rates being disproportionate, all of the things about the history of women and forced sterilization for example, the women in the California state prisons who were sterilized or and even what's happening at the border, right, like these women are alleging all kinds of unnecessary medical procedures, not just sterilization, but cyst removal and things that they don't have to have. All of that's available. If you do a Google search, it's there. The New York Times has done a great job reporting on a lot of this stuff, but so have other newspapers like The Washington Post, etc. But there is something about reading a novel that allows us to place ourselves in that situation and in that moment. It's a way to cut through the noise of our lives, and allow us to hear something in a different way.
People always say like, "When did you first learn about the Relf sisters? Well, I had learned about the Relf sisters, but I didn't really know-know a lot. And I think there are probably some listeners who knew a little bit about it, you know, but didn't really know-know. And then they read this book, and now they know-know. And movies, right? Movies can do the same thing. You can read about something, hear about something, and then you go into a movie, and then it's visually present and in a different way. So, I'm a big believer in novels; I love historical fiction, I love fiction inspired by real-life stories because it just allows me to enter that story in a completely different way.
Emily Silverman
I couldn't agree more. I just felt like I learned so much from this book that perhaps I wouldn't have from reading an article or a journalistic piece. And I was just able to get into the murkiness and the complexity of it in a way that you can't with data and with facts, so thank you for writing it. And, as I mentioned, at the top of the call, before we started recording, this is a podcast for healthcare workers. So, as we bring this to an end, I'm wondering, do you have a message or a thought that you would like to share with our audience?
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Oh, that's such a good question. I hope they'll read the book. I hope they'll share it with other healthcare professionals. Just so that we can constantly remind ourselves when you are in the room with a patient, particularly black women, that we see them, we hear them, we recognize the cultural and racial history that they carry. We understand if there's distrust, there's a reason for that distrust. There's a history there. And you know, we just take one extra minute. I know everybody is so overloaded, so overworked. I hear from so many of my physician friends that they're just so overworked and I get it. But I just hope that we take that one extra minute to make sure that we're really hearing the person in front of us so that some of these things we read about, like the maternal mortality rates and things like that, will no longer be or that we can at least make a dent in that because we took that one extra minute. And if everybody listening takes that one extra minute, that matters. And I promise to do the same in my life.
Emily Silverman
I have been speaking to Dolen Perkins-Valdez about her most recent novel, Take My Hand, highly, highly recommended to anybody in the healthcare profession. Thank you so much, Dolen, for being here today.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Thank you, Emily.