Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History

by Rich Benjamin Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

A piercingly powerful and deeply researched memoir, a son's account of the fallout in his mother's life of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and how that secrecy carried into his own life, coming of age as a boy with a life-threatening blood disease during Reagan's America.

Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero-a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country's president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle's parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.*

Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn't know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about-books, learning, world events-the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.*

It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn't just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America-of the human cost of the country's hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A brilliant, absorbing book, a family story, a tale of power, exile, and calamity, a love letter to Benjamin’s mother that becomes a deep look into the darkness of Haitian history. And it’s also a no-holds-barred autobiography. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Salman Rushdie, author of Knife

“Talk to Me is a tour-de-force! I was gripped by every page of this meticulously researched and emotionally rich mother-son memoir, which explores how one family is unmade and remade—again and again—by forces both external and internal. Rich Benjamin is a supremely talented writer, able to convey complex subject matters—the political landscape of Haiti, the parental abandonment that shaped him, and his reckoning with sickle cell anemia, being gay, and numerous family secrets—in elegant and moving prose. You will not be able to put it down!”
—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Little Monsters

“Rich Benjamin contains multitudes. The grandson of a president of Haiti, son of an Ivy League graduate, gifted with a brilliant mother who has organized child welfare programs for the United Nations in Africa, he’s also been arrested and thrown into the Tombs, the darkest corner of the New York penal system. An excellent ethnologist, he’s researched for years his family history in Haiti (and the sinister role the USA played in ousting his grandfather), but his mother—undemonstrative to and neglectful of her real children but a humanitarian hero who helped people all over the globe—is the true subject and recipient of this eloquent, Argos-eyed love letter.”
—Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191924649
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged