The first in a trilogy, The Secret Life of Grownups, is a humorous, lyrical, autobiographical novel told through the unflinching voice of a wildy observant twelve-year-old Black girl.

Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mary recounts her harrowing journey from childhood to adolescence as the “unicorn” in a struggling Black household.

Shuffled between the homes of her Trinidadian father and her mentally ill Southern Black mother and their extended families, Mary unveils the secret history of her family and the lives the grown-ups she’s been studying since the age of three. With alarming candor and disarming wit, she reveals the larger truth about what life is really like on planet earth for little Black girls who won’t be tamed--and who do not understand why the truth doesn’t actually set anyone free. Her story exposes what happens when generations of women are silenced and unprotected.

Before Mary was even born, her teenage mother tried to get rid of her three times. But Mary persisted. She is a gift to a people who do not know what to make of her fearless honesty, rich inner creative resources, and unwavering belief in the power of Joy to transform their lives. She knows these are dangerous stories to tell, but like her hero, the pirate princess Pippi Longstocking, Mary also knows that she must speak up for all the little girls with something important to say.

She has already lived in on a Black farm in South Carolina, and in Brooklyn with Trinidadian immigrants, and attended seven schools in two states--skipping two grades and winning every spelling bee. But her family doesn’t recognize her potential. They want her to be quiet, obedient, and ordinary and would rather she excel at singing in the church choir over books. They think she’s strange for building paper contraptions, bringing home strays, reading encyclopedias in the bathroom, and acting out comic books in the mirror. Her guileless nature is seen as an affliction, even as a kind of magic quietly transforms their lives.

But Mary is a unicorn—and there’s no one at the information desk to guide her. Instead, there’s her free-spirited, mentally ill mother, who disappears for weeks, and once got so angry that she dismantled a car into Piggly Wiggly grocery bags. Her larger-than-life aunts live out on the family farm with her powerful Granddaddy Zeke, who owns the small town of Eastover and is a hero for many and a monster for every girl child. Her zealot Trinidadian grandmother, who must be referred to at all times as Mrs. Drakes, goes on and on about the wages of sin and God’s big cake party in the sky. And then there’s her increasingly militant immigrant father who wears a different color Black Power t-shirt every day and wants to teach her to dream a different American Dream, who believes the solution for most things is Vaseline, and that everything comes from Africa.

Powerful love is everywhere—but so are predators. When familial neglect leads to her molestation, Mary turns to literature for answers. She finds solace in Ann Frank, kinship in Maya Angelou, and learns that she is not so strange as her family contends. Then she reads The Color Purple in an attempt to find God in all of this. If God answers Celie, Mary will believe her grandmother that church is good even though the preacher spends a suspicious amount of time at their house. When God does not answer Celie, Mary decides that she must become her own hero and reach out from her world of dreams and stories and bring them to life.

Navigating a maze of generational trauma, mental illness, contradicting values, and ever shifting cultural identity, Mary comes to see adults as reckless joy-stealers--so unlike the heroes in her beloved books. Mary persistently tries to figure out what she has to do or who she must become so she can be safe and find “The Joy.”

As she learns to shapeshift to survive the chaos, she eventually discovers she is a storyteller. An artist. A creator of joy. Her voice is her power—and she must use it to save herself.

Part southern gothic, part immigrant narrative, part family saga, part cultural indictment, and snapshot of a 1980s Generation X childhood, THE SECRET LIFE of GROWNUPS re-imagines the coming-of-age memoir with an unusual narration by a young Black girl, and by examining the past not as a painful time to be overcome but as an exploration of the nexus of history, biography, and society to reveal deeper universal truths about human existence that are often repressed in our culture.

Young Mary’s exuberant, expansive, humorous voice excavates intimate girlhood experiences, from navigating school and family dynamics to finding solace in books and pop culture, and contributes fresh perspectives to the ongoing dialogues on urgent societal issues, including race, colorism, gender identity, mental health, sexual violence, media culture, and the enduring legacies of US Slavery and Colonization that imprint secrets and denial on Black diaspora families of today–and the alchemical power of literature to overcome programmed narratives and institutional despair.

As history and lives collide and intertwine with all the harshness and gentleness of the ordinary, the results on paper can read like magical realism, and this aesthetic is not coincidental: the reality of lived Blackness and Black girlhood involve so many fantastical and extraordinary elements that are simply an accepted part of the fabric of everyday life.

Mary’s story is a testament to the resilience and creativity of a young girl determined to find joy and make sense of the world around her using what she has—her voice. If sincerity were a superpower, 12-year-old Mary McBeth would be the superhero the world needs right now.

Featuring previously unexplored subcultures of Black America, THE SECRET LIFE OF GROWNUPS (86,000 words and ready for publication) is an epic, humorous, voice-driven narrative that lays bare a young writer’s inner world and gives a voice to the voiceless; offering a fresh, deeply personal perspective on Black girlhood and the universal secret truths of family life.

This chapter was a finalist for the 2025 Zora Neale Hurston‍ ‍Richard Wright Foundation Crossover Award.