Tembe Denton-Hurst’s Debut Novel Expertly Dismantles the Myth of the Dream Job

There are plenty of pop-cultural narratives about young women seeking fame and fortune in the media and publishing industries, but few that feature Black, openly queer protagonists working overtime to succeed within systems that weren’t designed with their needs or experiences in mind. Into that void comes Tembe Denton-Hurst’s Mickey, who starts her arc in the novel Homebodies as a gainfully employed “media girl.” Soon, though, she’s lost the job that provided so much of her self-worth, and her relationship with her live-in girlfriend starts to crumble as she reconnects with an old flame and begins to question what, exactly, home means to her.

Homebodies is crackling with wit and compulsively readable, but it’s also an in-depth examination of the crushing reality that many workers in so-called “dream jobs”—especially Black women, who are so often pushed down the “office pet to office threat” pipeline that Erika Stallings has written about—are ultimately expendable to the institutions they devote themselves to. Vogue recently spoke to Denton-Hurst about making time to write fiction while working full-time in media, workshopping the novel that became Homebodies in a writing class with author Nicole Dennis-Benn, and what she wants for Mickey and all the girls out there who see themselves in her. 

Vogue: When did this book start to take shape for you?

Tembe Denton-Hurst: I would say shortly after I started working on it in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s writing workshop. It just kind of came out of me, and I initially thought, Oh, this is a short story, but then the story ended up being a meditation on the ways in which home had become estranged for Mickey. It really evolved from there; I told Nicole, “I think this is Mickey’s story about going home after she’s just lost her job and trying to contend with what it means to return when she’s different now. She’s lost all these things, and there’s this person that she still cares for, and then there’s the life that she left behind.” Nicole was like, “This is not a short story. This is a novel.” I realized that what I was trying to do in this very tight format was really ambitious, but I felt like a novel was also this really big thing to do. Nicole kind of gave me that permission and the confidence that pushed me to really work on the novel.

Homebodies so expertly captures what I think is a very common experience of feeling alienated in media when you don’t necessarily fit the industry prototype. What did it feel like to tell that story?

Someone actually asked me a question yesterday about how I did research for the book; they were like, “You and Mickey share all these characteristics, so how did you craft the character?” I’ve been in these rooms for so long and I know this world so intimately that my experience is the research, in some ways. And I wanted to talk about it because we still have still so much gatekeeping and standard-bearing that occurs in media. There’s still this ability to crown who’s new and who’s next—like there’s still this dialogue that happens, and it operates at so many levels that I think it was important to show what happens behind the scenes, and how Black women in this industry who don’t fit the white, straight, thin ideal are being treated. I think people just see it as this very glamorous job, and in some ways it is, but in more ways I think it actually forces you to kind of contend with your own identity. You’re always kind of wondering if you’re measuring up, and if you’re not, is it because you’re not good [enough] or because there’s all these things that you can’t change that are impacting the way that you’re being perceived? You know, there’s only so many people who get to be the beauty director of X, Y, or Z, and if everyone starts out at similar levels and people continue to rise through the ranks, you do have to make a decision of: Well, what is my path? What am I really trying to do? Do I really want to do this beauty-director thing? Do I really want to try to climb the ranks and rise through to this executive-editor level, or whatever it is? It’s not going to happen for everyone, right? And if it’s not going to happen for you, you have to decide: what are you willing to live with?

Are there books you love that made you feel like writing this book was possible?

There’s not a ton in contemporary Black literature, and I think I really wanted to explore the space in a way that I hadn’t really seen done before. But there are books that I think helped me to see the possibility of people reading and buying mine, like Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, which is also about a Black girl who works in media. They’re very different characters and very different stories, but they’re in similar professions and age groups. I’ve kept an eye on all the Black women’s coming-of-age stories that have come out since 2019 or so; I’ve been reading and paying attention to those, and I think they were all really helpful for me in terms of knowing that it was possible to put out the work that I did, even if it’s telling us a different story. It was like, there’s still space for this, and I don’t think I would have known that had I not had access to the crop of stories that had come out prior to this.

How did you balance writing Homebodies with your full-time job at New York magazine?

It was so hard! [Laughs.] I guess waking up really early in the morning, at like 5 a.m.? I think I reached this point—as many of us did, I think, during COVID—of, like, what am I doing with my life? Am I happy with where I am? And if not, what am I going to do about it? Are there big dreams that I want to chase that I’m not quite achieving? I always knew that I wanted to write fiction, and while I love the path that my career has taken, and I’ve loved being in journalism and doing beauty journalism, I realized I needed something for myself. At some point you reach that thing of: What is my career going to look like in the next five years? Like, am I still going to be doing this exact same thing? Am I gonna be okay with that? And if not, how do I need to maneuver to get to where I want to be? While I recognize that ascending the ranks of the masthead would be satisfying to me in some respects, in other ways, I knew that what I really wanted to do was tell stories. I think the desire for me to be up the chain was really about me being able to control the kinds of stories that I was telling. I mean, as a young girl, I had composition books filled with collages from Teen Vogue and Seventeen in the way that we all did. I didn’t go to J-school or go to college thinking, Oh, yes, my dream is to be a journalist; I just wanted to tell stories, and journalism was a great outlet to do that. But I always knew that I was [being called] to fiction. COVID gave me an opportunity to really take that seriously and to explore it. My fiancée gifted me a writing class for Christmas, which was really sweet; I burst into tears when she gave it to me, because I really think that in a lot of ways, that was the seed that allowed everything else to bloom. Her faith in me, and her saying, “This is my investment in you as a writer,” changed my life and changed the way I thought about myself and what I was capable of doing.

This might be corny, but what do you truly want for Mickey?

I hope that she can finally accept herself for all the parts that she is and understand that there’s nothing wrong with her. I think that for people who really identify with Mickey or read her story and see themselves in her, including me, there’s a level of telling ourselves that we aren’t enough or that if we were to just adjust ourselves in one way or another, we would achieve more or we would be better or we would do better. Like, so much of it is critical. And so I would want Mickey to fully accept herself; only then, I think, would we be able to see her turn some of that energy outward, and be a better friend, and that kind of thing.

Homebodies

$28 at BOOKSHOP

$27 at AMAZON