A piercingly powerful memoir a grandson’s account of the coup that ended his grandfather's
presidency of Haiti the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family and his urgent
efforts to know his mother despite the past. “A brilliant absorbing book...I couldn’t stop
reading.” —Salman Rushdie author of Knife 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.
