February 12, 2025
We welcomed cultural critic, scholar, and author Rich Benjamin (Searching for Whitopia) to celebrate the release of his memoir, Talk to Me. A powerful account of his family’s past, Benjamin details the coup that ended his grandfather’s presidency in Haiti—an event he knew little about as a child—and how his relationship with his mother, Danielle, fractured beneath the weight of this secrecy.
The child of Daniel Fignolé—a populist hero in 1950s Haiti—Danielle grew up comfortably in Port-au-Prince until 1957, when her father’s three-week presidency came to a violent end. Ordered by the Eisenhower administration, soldiers held her parents at gunpoint before exiling them to New York, while Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped and later smuggled out of the country. Talk to Me untangles the turmoil which resulted from these events, and the emotional toll it took on Benjamin’s mother during his childhood. Benjamin paints a poignant portrait—not just of his family’s history, but of America and the impact of its hostilities abroad, the difficulties faced by migrants, and how family ties endure through generations. A tale of both physical and emotional exile, Talk to Me is a “no-holds-barred autobiography” (Salman Rushdie) that is ultimately a homage to the author’s complex relationship with his mother and with Haiti. Bestselling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro (Signal Fires) joined Benjamin in conversation.
Presented in partnership with the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival and Haiti Cultural Exchange.
Featured Book
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Talk to Me
By Rich Benjamin
Published by Pantheon/PRH
Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.
Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn’t know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about—books, learning, world events—the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.
It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn’t just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America—of the human cost of the country’s hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.
In Conversation
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Rich Benjamin
Rich Benjamin
Rich Benjamin is the author of Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon Books, 2025), a family memoir that doubles as a portrait of America. Benjamin’s first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (2009), was selected for an Editor’s Choice award from the American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of the first to have illuminated in advance the rise of Trumpism, white anxiety, and white nationalism in current US life. Benjamin’s writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and he’s interviewed often in the international and US media, including NPR, MSNBC, and PBS. His work has received support from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Civitella, Bellagio, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
Photo Credit: Stephen K. Mack
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Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by NPR, Time Magazine, Washington Post, Amazon, and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Both Signal Fires and Inheritance were winners of the National Jewish Book Award. Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani’s book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing, has just been reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
