Deborah Paredez is the author of the new book American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous. Her other books include Selenidad. She is the chair of the writing program at Columbia University.
Q: What inspired you to write American Diva, and how was the book's title chosen?
A: I love performance and musicals, and I have training as a performance scholar. What I loved most was the performer being spectacularly virtuosic. Often in a musical, it was the diva figure. It’s accompanied by messiness as well, and I’m interested in that.
I was raised by an eccentric auntie who taught me to live life as a woman of color, how to insist upon yourself if no one else will.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen?
A: I was interested in thinking about diva figures and what they meant to my own life. Over the course of my lifetime, divas have played a role in shaping America more deeply. Shaping America, and shaping my life. I wanted to capture both a cultural critique and a memoir.
Q: How did you balance the two?
A: I was interested in telling the story of divas over the past 50 years, telling it in a compelling way, and using memoir as a way in. Instead of a straightforward historical treatise, the idea was to open up moments of my life where divas played a part, and then look at the key concepts—what it meant to make a comeback, what it meant to have a certain style.
Divas are often associated with being for themselves and about themselves, but they often form deep relationships with their fans. I realized how much divas had facilitated important relationships in my life—Tina Turner with my father, Rita Moreno with my mother. Telling the memoir part of the story helped me emphasize how we think of ourselves.
Q: Which divas especially mean a lot to you?
A: My prima prima donna is my great-aunt Lucia. We can all identify women like that in our lives. You don’t have to be famous, influential, or white.
Tina Turner was very influential as the idea of someone coming back in midlife after such an arduous journey, so much violence. There also are some things you can’t come back from.
The Williams sisters—as I was raising my own child, a girl of color who plays tennis, watching them transform the sport had an impact on me as a mother.
Q: Brandon Tensley wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, “By the book's end, Paredez's thesis becomes entirely persuasive: The word ‘diva’ is best used not for an opera virtuoso, but for any bold person whose work nourishes people who are too often starved of power.” What do you think of that description, and how would you define a diva?
A: I loved that description. I believe a diva is virtuosic. The idea of virtuosity has fallen out of use—a diva has become a term of derision. For me, it is someone virtuosic who doesn’t apologize for it.
It’s also someone who can push against the boundaries of propriety, who can push against boundaries of gender and race. That’s central to what makes a diva powerful and scary to some.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book?
A: It made it clear to me how much divas helped me facilitate relationships in my life.
It helped me see the connections between divas and the contemporary definition of feminism. It is used to promote and to contain feminism. Divas and feminism have not always gone hand in hand—sometimes it’s used to promote, sometimes to punish.
Q: Why did you focus on the past 50 years?
A: I chose it because it’s the span of my lifetime, but also because during that period, there was a tremendous change in what the word “diva” meant.
I was born into a world where “diva” was reserved for virtuosic opera sopranos, the higher forms of art, and was racialized for glamorous white women. Then it became a word used against Black women for making too many demands.
In the 1990s there was a proliferation of the word. Suddenly the word just took off. Why was this happening? It was a moment where ideas of post-feminism were emerging. There were attempts to try to look as if you were promoting feminist ideas but also trying to contain them. One example is Sex and the City—a hyperconsumerist moment.
The idea of diva and feminism started circulating everywhere. Diva was a way to use feminism—you buy a fur coat and act like a brat and suddenly you’re a feminist. Even as it was being used like this, divas were pushing back against it.
In the early 2000s, “diva” was used to apply to girls. There were advertisements saying that girls in the ‘90s were can-do girls, now be a diva, the best successful kind of girl. But only certain kinds of white girls could be divas.
Q: What were some of the surprises you found in your research?
A: Learning about how there was a relationship between divas and girlhood in the early 2000s surprised me. I gave birth to a daughter right in the middle of that, and I could look back and see, That’s what I was seeing!
I learned that Grace Jones wants oysters in her dressing room all the time—funny anecdotes.
I learned that when Tina Turner was trying to leave Ike, she had no money. Ann-Margret and Cher helped her out. These were relationships they formed in moments of need.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A totally different kind of project—a book about second-hand and thrift. It’s about my relationship to thrift store shopping and the idea of second-hand as an artistic process.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I call this American Diva—98 percent of the women I talk about are women of color. It was important to me to have them in the book. I want to honor women of color and how to negotiate life as a woman of color.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Deborah Paredez.
