She ain't the only one regretting using dating apps.
Read this article last week.. Seems like sh|t ain't all sugar and roses dealing with these white boys on these apps.
Candice Carty-Williams: it’s high time black women had a voice
Her debut novel has stormed bestseller lists and been called a politicised Bridget Jones. Candice Carty-Williams tells Susannah Butter how she wrote Queenie for young people like her
- SUSANNAH BUTTER
- 21 hours ago
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ES Lifestyle
Her majesty: novelist Candice Carty-Williams ( Matt Writtle )
Candice Carty-Williams is a lot happier since she gave up dating apps. “All I had on there was white guys saying, ‘I want to try your chocolate skin,’” says the 29-year-old with a resigned look, her turquoise nose stud catching the light. “Comments like that are commonplace. It’s dehumanising getting messages like, ‘Come dominate me, ebony princess.’ I was a dominant for a month because a guy wanted it.”
In her debut novel, Queenie
The young black female voice we all need to hear
“I’d have loved to have read a book like Queenie when I was going through something similar in my early twenties,” she continues. “I didn’t see myself represented anywhere. When you see a black woman on TV you think: ‘She’s sassy and strong. I’m not like that, there’s something wrong with me; I need to toughen up.’ Black women are rarely presented as wives. They are vixens; exotic. There is a dearth of representations of black women and it’s about time that changed.”
While Queenie is not Carty-Williams, the author “writes what I know” — both are young black Londoners living in the time of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, working in predominantly white industries with experience of anxiety and depression.
Carty-Williams is “still processing” her success. Despite working in publishing and setting up the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize to support under-represented authors, she never imagined writing her own novel.
We meet at Penguin’s offices, where Carty-Williams is a marketing executive (she’s leaving in May to concentrate on her second novel). She puts her phone on silent, showing me her Lizzo phone case: “I’ve interviewed Lizzo and I loved her. She is like the sun.”
Queenie is number two on the Sunday Times bestsellers list (Matt Writtle)
Queenie began with a Facebook post two years ago. Carty-Williams saw that novelist Jojo Moyes was offering aspiring writers a residency in her Saffron Walden cottage for a week. “I applied and said I work in publishing but I don’t have the access to writing that a lot of my peers have. I haven’t gone on holiday for seven years — any time off I do have I end up sleeping because working is so exhausting. And, living in shared houses, I don’t have the space to write.”
Moyes could tell Carty-Williams could write from her 500-word application. In November 2017 Queenie’s author borrowed a friend’s car and headed to Essex. “Jojo’s husband met me at the cottage with a loaf of bread. That was too nice,” she says. “I wasn’t used to it. I asked how I could thank him. He replied, ‘Write a bestseller’.
“When he left I sat on the sofa, pulled a blanket around me, put the TV on because I like noise and wrote until 4am. I did 8,000 words the first night.”
The countryside felt terrifyingly remote. “I kept thinking about the TV show Jonathan Creek and how that’s the kind of place where s*** goes down. I was a black girl alone in an author’s cottage. I didn’t sleep for the first night because I was scared.”
"All I got on dating apps was white guys saying they wanted to come over and try my chocolate skin."
Candice Carty-Williams
Carty-Williams had no plan for the story but Queenie was already in her head. “I knew she wasn’t going to be strong. People are going to want to shake her but also be kind to her — you have to like the main character. She’s a version of me that’s less in control. I don’t drink and I’m regimented with my time. Queenie is not, so she’s more fun. It’s fun to write because I can put her through s*** with no consequences.”
Back in London she waited until Christmas to return to Queenie, working nights and weekends. “I’d leave work on a Friday, stock up on food and not emerge until Monday.” Now she lives in Herne Hill, near the train track, which she finds soothing. But back then she was renting a studio in Streatham, with black mould that gave her asthma. “I had no room — I wrote in bed with my laptop.”
Then, social media came into its own again. “I tweeted that I had a first draft, saying it was like a black Bridget Jones. Jo Unwin, now my agent, slid into my DMs two seconds later asking to see.”
After tweaks from four trusted friends, whom Carty-Williams asked to tell her what they didn’t like, she sent Queenie to Unwin. “I submitted it through the official channels,” she says proudly. “I burst into tears when Jo told me we’d had offers from publishers. She dropped what she was holding to hug me.”
Like Bridget Jones, Queenie is about the love life of a woman who can be reckless. “Queenie’s best friend is called Darcy, which hints at the question of whether you need a man to save you. But it couldn’t be the same because Bridget Jones is not politicised. Queenie’s existence isn’t guys turning up at her flat with flowers helping her make dinner; it is guys asking, ‘Can I come round and f*** you?’”
Queenie, which comes with three covers
Carty-Williams no longer dates white men. “I’ve been in too many interracial relationship dynamics to know that nothing good can come to me from them.” Seeing black men is “not all rosy (dating never is) but I’ve had no upfront sex requests or dikk pics.”
Today she has her hair up in a perky top knot but usually she wears a headscarf to avoid having to tell people they can’t touch her hair. “The work that goes into saying no is exhausting — who wants to say no? It’s work on top of work.”
Brexit has given people licence to “be more open with the xenophobia”. She adds: “After the referendum a guy on a bus in Croydon told me I couldn’t sit next to him because I wasn’t British. I didn’t say anything — he was terrifying.”
Carty-Williams grew up all over south London, reeling off areas: Streatham, Lewisham, Croydon. Her father is a taxi driver who met her mother picking her up after a night shift as a receptionist. When she was born he was with another woman, who was also pregnant, and he wasn’t around when she was growing up. “I’m open about being the product of an affair,” she says. “I represent a group.”
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After years with no contact, Carty-Williams’s father got in touch when he heard about Queenie. “He asked if I could pay his mortgage. In a WhatsApp message. He didn’t ask how I was. I sent him a nice review and he said he didn’t read it. Yet he wanted the money. It’s so brazen, it rocks you. I was disappointed but I wasn’t surprised. That’s the sad thing.”
What does she make of those who associate a lack of male role models with a rise in knife crime? “It’s bulls***. These boys are taking lives because they do not understand their value or the value of others. As a person of colour in Western society your value is nothing. You need so much inner fortitude, good people and institutions to help because you aren’t starting at the same level.”
Her mother and younger sister, who is 20, have been keeping tabs on book sales. “My mum’s been playing secret shopper. She went into Waterstones and asked how Queenie was selling.” She’s allowed herself one reward from Queenie’s profits, a brown £300 Gucci belt: “I’m sensible with money because I’ve seen how easily it can go.”
Her second novel is about grief. Carty-Williams has been shaped by the death of two of her friends when she was in her early twenties. One had cancer and the other overdosed three months later. “When I heard about my second friend I stood in the street screaming. For a year I couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t go to Tesco at the end of my road. Cognitive behavioural therapy helped.”
Is she positive about the future? “Understanding privilege and how to make things better is one thing. But every interview I’ve done I have to talk about race in the industry. When I can just talk about the work I’ve written, that’s when I will think things are changing.”
And let me guess some brother should be honored to date this former bedwench huh?
These are professional black women btw.
I mean just look at the common denominator.
look at what she's writing... even in the article she has no foresight...