Honor Jones — Sleep - with Clint Smith

This event is in partnership with The Atlantic.Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously - the one she was born into, and the one she has made.Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents' bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what's on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593851982?ic_referral=EcAU95TK56eXBC8s8IXGdt23PkQ2rUoRPVItqIIbnBUwMyTtseYGi4wM7ogPmkF2e7_yF2b32DE-Ox2NgsiaGgli5Cmr97mbhI6XCF1xiTMqFWPOymnvUQ0SOUetTqFUmz9ORp0Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and previously at The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.Jones is in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collections Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award and most recently Above Ground. His poetry collection, Above Ground, was recently published on March 28th. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.*recorded 5/23/2025