fiction

The experience of reading literary diaries and letters can feel like an act of voyeurism. For the reader, the first few pages of revelations are guiltily tantalizing, as the inner life of a literary figure comes into focus and trips are made behind closed doors.

Minter was pushed into theater by her mother, Charlotte Shelby, who could have been the model for the stereotype of the pushy stage parent. Shelby controlled her daughter’s career—lying about her daughter’s birth date to skirt age restrictions for actors; moving Minter, her sister, and grandmother from Louisiana first to New York and then to Hollywood; pushing her into one project after another and then collecting all the paychecks. 

We were fishermen.

Father first called us so after he whipped us sore for fishing at the Ala stream in the summer of May 1995. Earlier that year, the bank had transferred him from our hometown of Akure to Yola, a volatile and violence-prone city in the north of Nigeria. Father wouldn't move us with him so he lived apart and visited only once in two weeks, always coming at midnight on Fridays and disappearing at dawn on Sundays. Each time he returned, mother would detail how the house had fared in his absence—a breakdown of home needs and how they were met, of whom she had borrowed from, of our school reports, of the church, of street happenings (like the thief lynched by the mob, his horrifying scream as the fire engulfed him). She remembered everything, and we often joked that if she'd been schooled, she would have made a great historian.