What do we want from our stories?

New film release American Fiction satirises storytelling and the expectations placed on authors. Jamie Smith records his reactions to watching the movie.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A man sitting at a restaurant table turns and looks aside.

Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison aka Stagg R. Leigh.

Orion Productions.

This article was first published on the author’s Substack Quid Amo, December 16 2023.

On a recent visit to Los Angeles, my wife Deanna and I went to see Cord Jefferson’s new satire, American Fiction, playing in only seven theaters nationwide right now. The film is a smart, beguiling adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure.

Part of the fun of watching movies in L.A. is being reminded what a company town LA still is. We were slightly puzzled when, as a production company splash screen opened the film, a ripple of hoots and applause bubbled up from the audience. When, at the end of the movie, we saw an entire group video-recording the rolling credits, we realized a production team was in the house, seeing their work on the public screen.

Watching this particular movie in L.A. was especially entertaining because of its meta commentary on our storytelling industries, including film. The winks & nods about screenwriting, adaptation, and philistine studio executives occasioned knowing guffaws in the audience.

The movie asks important, uncomfortable questions about the stories that “we” (scare quotes will become obvious in a second) want to hear today, and why.

What’s supposed to be a farce is embraced by white marketing executives as the latest Black trauma porn for awards season.

The key facet of the plot is relatively simple: a Black novelist (Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played cagily by Jeffrey Wright) has published several works of deft, critically-celebrated literary fiction. But he can’t sell his latest novel. His agent informs him why: “It’s not Black enough.” The Black novelist is puzzled (“But I’m Black!”) until he wanders into a reading from a new bestseller, the latest by a Black novelist celebrated by some famous white woman’s Book Club. Written in dialect, with flat characters and tired tropes, the novel panders to and perpetrates horrendous stereotypes dusted with a hint of redemption. But it does so with just the right dose of guilt-induction for white readers to feel morally assuaged just by reading the book. The publishing industry has seized upon the mad, pretzeled formula: You can sell a lot of books to white people by offering them the thrill of a little enlightened guilt that actually depends on their continued racist stereotypes.

In a fit of disgust, rage, and desperation, “Monk” begins banging out just such a novel, determined to play a kind of Sokal-hoax on the publishing industry. Just one problem: the market clamors to buy this dreck and even turn it into a movie. What’s supposed to be a farce is embraced by white marketing executives as the latest Black trauma porn for awards season. You can imagine the comedic possibilities here. It’s a funny movie.

As a white viewer of this movie, if I laugh at all the right points and get all the inside jokes, am I being offered a little absolution?

But it is also tender. What’s playing out on screen—the story surrounding the creation of the novel’s story—is a very different kind of Black story. Monk, it turns out, is the black sheep only because he’s a PhD in a family of MDs. Here is a Black family with a massive Victorian home in Boston and a beach house on the Cape—which is just to say, they are a family of accomplished professionals like so many others. Are we surprised? Like any human family, of course, their life is not without pain, loss, heartbreak, and animosity. But like any human family, there is also achievement, pride, joy, connection.

Here’s a Black family. Here’s their story. Is this a “Black story?” Is it “Black enough?” What do we want from our stories?

Jefferson’s endeavor here is fraught, and he knows it. The last part of the movie “goes meta” as a way to concede that there’s no “clean” way to raise these questions without slipping back into being part of the problem. As a white viewer of this movie, if I laugh at all the right points and get all the inside jokes, am I being offered a little absolution? To his credit, Jefferson never quite lets a viewer like me off the hook. Something about this story will, and should, remain unavailable to me.

But also to his credit, Jefferson had me thinking of the Roman poet Terence when we walked out of the cinema. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” Jefferson tells a story that, in this climate, is willing to risk a claim to human solidarity.

Article

Care

Culture

Mental Health

12 May 2025

3 min read

Separating mind and body still stigmatises mental health

Our minds and bodies are meant to be inseparable.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

Two bird sit on wires facing in opposite directions.

Eduardo Soares on Unsplash.

I recently had a somewhat surreal experience whilst trying to get two consultants to agree to some treatment I needed to have.

One was a cardiologist, the other a psychiatrist - both consultants, working in the same geographical area - and I found, to my surprise, that there was no recourse for my physical health records to be viewed by the psychiatrist and vice versa.

And as I went through the process of trying to mediate between these two professionals, it made me reflect that whilst in theory there is agreement that our minds and our bodies are one and that they cannot be treated wholly separately, the reality is something rather different.

Mental and physical health problems are, in fact, treated as entirely separate entities, with different trusts and funding models in place to deliver care and treatment for mental illness and physical illness.

Now, there is probably a bureaucratic reason for this, but I believe it uncovers a perhaps unconscious belief that our minds and bodies are distant relatives at best, and not only that, but our mental health is still the poorer relation - best ignored unless it’s particularly bothersome.

I think this separation sits at the heart of the stigma that mental health problems still face - a stigma that persists even in the mental health system. It has ancient roots. Go back to ancient Greece and its philosophers. They held to a doctrine where the body and soul were completely separate - our bodies are simply houses for our souls. In a way, the stigma that exists about mental health is the inverse of this- that our minds are less important than our physical bodies and that caring for mental health always comes second to caring for physical health.

Yet, also in those ancient times, the Bible's treatment of humanity shows that we are creations of mind, body, and soul—all equal, beloved, and cared for by God. In Mark’s gospel, we read that the command to love God and one another is multi-faceted: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” To love one another, then, means we need to care for one another’s mental health as well as physical health and strength, as we love with our minds and bodies.

In truth, we cannot care well for ourselves or one another without considering both our mental and physical health. To ignore the mental strain of physical illnesses like cancer, and ignore the physical pains that mental illnesses cause, such as their effects on digestion and blood pressure, is to ignore significant parts of people's suffering.

In the Old Testament of the Bible there is the story of Elijah, one of the great prophets who flees from a murderous ruler and, whilst spiritually and physically exhausted, begs God for death. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

These are words of desperation that echo those who struggle with their mental health, and God’s reply to Elijah’s pain is to meet him with an encounter with an angel who urges him to sleep and eat, comforting him with the words “the journey is too much for you”. There is no reprimand for Elijah’s suffering, simply comfort for a tortured mind and provision for an exhausted body.

The answer, then, is to treat ourselves and others as the embodied creations we are, with mind and body inseparable and interconnected in ways that even science cannot quite explain or articulate.

The answer is to trust in the embodied hope of Christ, who chose to save us through not only his bodily crucifixion and resurrection, but through experiencing the breadth and depth of human emotions so that we may never again feel alone in them.

Both our bodies and our minds matter to God, and we need to see that reflected in society, where we care not just for single ailments, but the whole person. We need not just an awareness of our minds, but an understanding of what it means to be mentally healthy, as well as a recognition of the horrors of mental illness. Only then, I believe, can we see a society which cares and serves those most in need not simply as isolated symptoms, but as valuable creations.