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What you want to do is debrief failures openly. That’s really critical to resilience, because otherwise when people fail they’re totally unprepared for it.

It's much more helpful to say I understand you’re probably in a lot of pain right now, and I want you to know I’m here with you. Just the acknowledgment and conveying you want to support them is much more helpful.

One of the things that affected me most, actually, was watching Sheryl commit to finding joy.

Junot Díaz’s Drown and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!—both of those collections, from the late ’90s—and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which I still think is one of the most perfect short stories ever written.

Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men. In that book, she writes, “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

And this tends to turn into the idea that writers of color are in some sort of “identity corner,” whereas white writers just get to write about life. I will never forget one night in workshop when the professor asked our brilliant mutual friend Brit Bennett to explain what her story had to say about the black experience. Like her story had to be some after-school special, either harrowing or uplifting, just because her characters were black.