Morgan Parker on Past Selves, Moving Home, and Teen Movie Cliches

Words: Claire Mooney

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When Morgan Parker gets to heaven, she’s going to wear her good bra. The poet - and screenwriter-to-be - has been wrestling with religious shame, pop culture, and public grief for some time now. Her poems, tiny ethnographies of Black millennial neuroses, have earned her the title “The Bard of Black American Loneliness.”

In her most recent work, and first essay collection, You Get What You Pay For  Parker has internalised Saidaya Hartman’s truism “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.” The essays are interested in the forces that turn Black subjectivity into objectivity, but these are personal texts too - Parker also lives in the time of streaming and self-help for single 30-somethings. Parker is a rare thinker who shares subject specialties with Bridget Jones and Zora Neale Hurston. 

Parker speaks to me from her LA home via video call about the You Get What You Pay For book tour, contorting high school trauma to fit narrative structure, and how a friend becomes your agent.  

I read you have a toolbox for tour that you built with your therapist.

That was the plan, and at the end of the day, it was a struggle just to get me out the door. My friend Tommy Pico was here, literally, turning out the lights behind me. I didn't expect my body to be in so much pain. In DC, I was Googling, emergency massage. And the woman was like, “Oh my God,” while she was massaging. 

I love your cover. I've been getting compliments when I take it places. 

I'm really happy with that. I love Lorna [Simpson]. It's a dream to have her on the cover. It's been important for me since my first book to feature amazing Black women artists on the covers because their work feels so part of my writing process.

How did you get your agent? As a poet and as a screenwriter? 

My agent was my friend first. My friend interned with him over the summer and then we all hung out that summer and stayed friends. The origin of Who Put This Song On? is I had an essay that I read at a reading that people were super into. Someone approached me and was like, “Have you ever considered turning this into a young adult novel?” They emailed me from FSG. And I was like, “Yes!” I had not. But she asked me to go to this meeting. I go to the meeting. It's really overwhelming. I get home from that meeting. I email my friend and say “hey, I think I might need an agent to navigate this sort of stuff because I'm a poet, we don't know anything about this,” even in grad school there were agent info sessions, but the poets couldn't go. It was only fiction. “Please help me.” And he called me and was like, “shut up. I'm your agent.” And the agent that I have now for screen is under the same company that I signed with my friend. He was at ICM. Which is now CAA, which are huge agencies, but I didn't know that. I've just been lucky that this is a person that I trust and trusted already.

How long has it been since you've moved back to California? Are you seeing any ghosts of your past selves?

When I first moved it was weird because I was still finishing Who Put This Song On? I think this summer it'll be seven years. I have such a different relationship to it now. My best friend, from high school, does live in Koreatown. So I see him a lot, it's kind of a, “Wow! We made it” sort of thing. To choose to be here is a different thing. I also didn't mention, but Who Put This Song On? I'm working on the screen adaptation. I've been working on that for maybe the past five years. So I'm still really entrenched. 

Has it been freeing? To reexamine the narrative?

I went through so many relationships with the main character and by proxy my past self. Sometimes, I was embarrassed by her, angry at her. I pitied her, I loved her. I felt protective, I went through all these cycles of reckoning with the story and the character. So creating the main character of the film has been thinking about, who does this character need to be? And what is the story that we're telling?  The genre of young adult and, specifically, the teen movie, [the producers are] like, “It's gotta go really, really quick!” and “It's gotta be this, this, this! And what about prom?” I'm out here being like, “The stakes are - she wanted to commit suicide and now she doesn't.” And they're like. “But what about the crush?!” What are the expectations? How can we buck them or how can we play into them and subvert something about it. There is some wish fulfillment to it. I'm understanding the political implications of that. From the beginning my two things have been - no one's throwing their pills down the toilet and she doesn't get the guy. Sometimes the payoff is just you know who your friends are better, you know yourself a little bit more and it’s a problem if we're thinking that that’s less valuable than getting the prom date.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.