■ Spite is fuel. People like to tell Black girls what they cannot and will never be able to do. And I’m like, Oh, OK, well, now I’m going to have to show you. There’s a saying, “Those who cannot hear will feel,” and I like to make sure people feel it.

■ When I wrote Hood Feminism, people said, “The hood’s not like this.” I don’t know what your experience was, but in my neighborhood, everybody knew everybody. The teachers knew our parents. My grandmother and my vice principal knew each other from school. There were these labyrinth interconnections where they went to the same churches. Not that it’s a good political practice, but a weird facet of segregation is that it binds people together.

■ When I was 8, an aunt’s ex-husband put a loaded gun to my head to make a point about money. He was going to shoot me. My other aunt was in her nightie with a bottle of barbecue sauce — Open Pit — and this man is going off because he’s decided her sister owes him money. He’s drunk. She tells him, essentially, “Motherfucker, if you crack it, I’m coming.” And she’s swinging this bottle of barbecue sauce. She’s five feet tall and a demon. I think he looked in her face and truly believed that even if he managed to kill me, he wasn’t leaving that house. I still don’t eat Open Pit.

■ I once told my grandmother, who was born in 1924, that I wanted to drop out of high school and take the GED. I was 15. She had just had a radical mastectomy, and I don’t know to this day how she did it, but that old lady raised up an arm that didn’t have no strength to choke the shit out of me. I got the full “Hope and the Dream of the Slave” speech. If I tell that to somebody Black of a certain generation, they’re going to be like, “Oh, you fucked up.”

■ Early on, I would get upset, and my husband would be like, “This is completely disproportionate to what is happening.” And I had to learn that everything doesn’t require the top of the pops, right? But then he met the rest of my family, and he was like, “Oh, you’re doing way better than I would expect.”

■ I’m the most average Midwestern bitch of all time. When I found out I made the New York Times bestseller list, I was in the drive-through at Culver’s. My editor called and told me, and I’m like, “What?” It was a month or two after the book had come out, right before COVID, and I just assumed it was never making the list. We pull around to get our food, and I’m blubbering, full-on crying. The girl at the window is looking at my husband like, Do I have to hit you with something? Because he has resting murder face. And I’m like, “No, these are good tears.”

■ I love Michelle Obama, but “When they go low, we go high” is the dumbest shit she ever said. When they go low, go to hell. Go all the way down. Nobody stops hurting you because you ask them nicely. They do stop hurting you because you kick them in the nuts or stick your thumbs in their eyes. They stop hurting you because it costs too much to keep trying.