Hello and welcome to the Terrible Reading Club, conversations with authors who wrote good

books for terrible times.

Those of us with parents who are consistent and present, who gave us stability and love

and who nurtured and cared for us, we sometimes don't know how lucky we are, how lucky we

were to have our needs met as kids. And maybe luck isn't the right word because this is

actually our birthright. We are born deserving to be loved and prioritized and cared for

not just physically but emotionally. We don't know when we're telling our mother that

she's the worst mom in the world because she doesn't want to take us to target for body

glitter after a long day of work that actually our mom is just tired and drawing a boundary

and the worst bombs in the world don't sit around waiting to hear the critiques of their

children. There are kids who have grown up without the kind of parents you see on 90s sitcoms,

kids whose parents abdicated all responsibility, who walked off the job, who just didn't

do the one thing they were supposed to have done.

And the writer Danielle Henderson is one of those kids. She's a grown up now, a writer

of TV and of her memoir The Ugly Cry, a book that traces Danielle's childhood as a black

girl in a very white town in upstate New York with her brother Corey and a mother who is

distant and struggling with her own life's disappointments. At 10 years old, Danielle's

mother drops her and Corey off at their grandparents house for the weekend. But the weekend doesn't

end and Danielle and her brother are raised by their grandmother who does not let them

win at monopoly, lets them watch horror movies and loves them both very dearly even if she

is nothing like the other grandmas they know. This book is in a lot of ways a love letter

to a grandmother like no other described on the opening page like this.

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