Lifestyle
Queenie's second life on screen gives her more room to grow
In the episode “From Virgin to Vixen,” Queenie is in peak fun mode, until her demons begin to catch up with her.
Latoya Okuneye/Lionsgate
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Latoya Okuneye/Lionsgate
The new Hulu series Queenie explores the quarter-life growing pains of lonely South Londoner Queenie Jenkins.
The first of her British Jamaican family to go to university, Queenie is a struggling writer awkwardly straddling multiple worlds. An unwanted breakup with her white, longtime live-in boyfriend Tom sends her painfully reeling — spiraling into, and then climbing out of, destructive behaviors and onto a journey of growth and self-acceptance.
The show, which premiered Friday, is based on a 2019 book by Candice Carty-Williams. And with Carty-Williams at the creative helm, the novel’s strengths are immediately visible on screen: the sharp social observation, the rawness of the voice, and the specificity and conundrums of aspirational, young Black British life in the millennium.
As showrunner, Carty-Williams effectively translates and expands her vision, addressing the pain points that both riveted and rankled the book’s readers and ensuring that the creative aspects of production also make an impression. Through sight, sound and performance, Queenie creates an empathetic and irresistible portrait of a young woman’s life in multicultural-yet-divided London.
The performances bring the novel to life
As great as the production sounds and looks, it’s the performances that make Queenie’s journey really accessible on screen. The material is challenging and multi-tonal but not a performance hits a wrong note. British actor Dionne Brown embodies Queenie Jenkins inside and out in a breakout role that is a world away from her restrained supporting performance as a police detective in the Apple TV+ crime drama Criminal Record. Brown told NPR she felt drawn to the role because of how strongly she related to the novel: “my most visceral and initial reaction was just, I didn’t know that other women felt like this. I didn’t know other Black women felt like this.” So throughout taping she used the book “like a Bible.”
And though it’s her first screen acting role, hip-hop artist Bellah is bubbly and fierce as Queenie’s bestie Kyazike. As her loving and protective Jamaican grandparents, Joseph Marcell (butler Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) and actress and comedian Llewella Gideon steal every scene they’re in. Pivotally, BAFTA-nominated actor Samuel Adewunmi, so powerful in the crime drama You Don’t Know Me, radiates charisma and kindness as Kyazike’s cousin Frank.
The format allows the audience to go deep
The eight-episode series format allows viewers to go deep into Queenie’s world, getting to know friends and family and helping us understand how love surrounds Queenie without her really feeling it. Where the novel can seem a bit bleak in spite of the humor, episodic TV gives Carty-Williams more room to experiment with different moods and tones. A few days before the premiere, Carty-Williams told NPR that she knew “we would need a lot more light on the screen” in the TV adaptation.
Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie stars Dionne Brown and Bellah.
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Ramona Rosales/Disney
Carty-Williams also said she felt fiercely protective bringing her first published novel to the screen. Basing Queenie’s story on her own experience coupled with second hand-horror stories from friends, “I had all those feelings and I didn’t want them to be stripped away, or watered down. The politics were important to me, the characters are important to me.” Queenie is a young woman’s story, but it’s also the manifestation of the adage that the personal is political. Queenie’s experiences lay bare the contours and consequences of England’s casual racism in every dimension of daily life. That includes, “the ways that [Queenie] was treated by people. This is at work, this is in relationships, this is in her relationship with Tom.” Carty-Williams said she was “willing to fight” to ensure that Queenie’s mental and emotional journey of finding herself in this world she saw as unfair made it to the screen intact.
Despite the production’s extensive management structure (Lions Gate, Disney’s Onyx Collective, and British Channel 4 were involved and over a dozen executives), it’s clear she succeeded. The show teems with the sometimes-painful, subtly-political observational humor and confessional motif that made the book stand out – and all the elements work well together.
Some important changes from novel to screen
Still, though faithful to the novel’s quarter-life crisis story, with the book’s most memorable thoughts and lines of dialogue making the leap almost verbatim from page to screen, the script bears some important changes. For one, Queenie’s circle includes a romantic addition – best friend Kiyazike’s cousin Frank, a friend and new love interest who appeared once briefly in the novel. Frank’s addition improves the series by addressing one of the biggest issues dogging the novel’s more ambivalent readers: Queenie’s fear and avoidance of Black men in favor of often painful encounters with white and brown men.
Queenie’s original release reflected both the pervasiveness and abuse of “rom-com” and “chick-lit” as book industry terms of art, and the delicate tightrope that Black writers walk telling stories about love, sex and race.
When Queenie debuted it appeared on best seller lists in multiple countries. Queenie won both Best Debut and Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Carty-Williams was the first Black woman author to win the latter award.
In Britain, where Carty-Williams grew up, Queenie quickly found a fiercely loyal following — a largely female audience that loved its voice and perspective. Many of those readers were women of color, Black British women who identified fiercely with the young woman struggling to claim love, career, self worth and mental health.
But the book’s popular and critical reception was somewhat mixed in the U.S., where the author was an unknown quantity. At minimum, some audiences were discomfited by Queenie’s emotional scarring and trauma around race when they believed they were promised something lighter – the heft and trauma of the book billed as a Black Bridget Jones Diary seemed to betray its framing. While Bridget Jones’ deepest insecurities stemmed from 10 extra pounds, granny panties and two very different suitors, Queenie grapples with racism, a miscarriage and sexual trauma. And some vocal African American readers were unhappy with its handling of these heavier themes. At worst, some storylines were seen as painfully self-hating or even the product of internalized anti-Black racism.
Falling into ever more painful situations, Queenie has sex with men who talk about and treat her in demeaning, if not downright racist ways — the men she meets in apps and in the neighborhood reference her race, color, and the contours of her body as though she is a sex toy. They don’t see or aren’t that interested in her intelligence and her pain.
Gallery/Scout Press
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Gallery/Scout Press
Carty-William’s unflinching portrayal of Queenie’s situation is one of the novel’s most challenging aspects. Though Queenie notices and complains about the degrading approaches, she dates a series of these men and continues to long for the return of a boyfriend who seems to treat her with little regard. She seems to internalize racism and brush off the disrespect, taking it in stride as long as the men dishing it out are not Black. Even for a literary novel (which despite the comedic tone, Queenie really is) that would be hard to take in (Luster comes to mind). But that’s not how the book was positioned. Though Carty-Williams used the “Black Bridget Jones” marketing pitch to broaden the readership, she’s also said of Queenie: “She’s not Bridget Jones. She could never be.” As a result of the label, though, and the gorgeous, brightly-colored cover drawing of a Black woman with braids and hoop earrings, Black women were primed to see themselves at the center of romance-infused comedy. That’s not what they got.
Instead, the novel Queenie offers a sometimes harrowing multidimensional portrait of the dynamics of love, work and identity, mental health, and the Black immigrant experience. The love and acceptance Queenie eventually finds is hard won, and it lies not in a romantic relationship but within herself and her community. That’s a healthy choice. But every genre makes a promise, and a bait and switch in terms of reader expectations can feel like erasure.
Exploring critically important topics in the book and on screen
That said, as Carty-Williams emphasizes, discomfiting or not, Queenie’s experience is worth delving into. If it’s hard to reconcile Queenie’s sharp insight and her self-destructive actions, it’s also true that Queenie navigates a world that routinely doesn’t see, or fetishizes and even villainizes, her. Exploding the stereotype of a “strong Black woman,” with intense vulnerability, parts are hard to watch, but through her experimentation and misadventures, both the novel and the series explore essential topics: the racial and gender dynamics and politics of consent and desirability, and the rippling effects of domestic partner abuse. It is hard to watch her covet white attention and approval even when it hurts her, but it’s something that many Black women have been through.
Dionne Brown as Queenie in a scene with her best friend Kyazike, played by Bellah.
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Latoya Okuneye//Disney
A big challenge for the screen adaptation is that despite therapy, Queenie’s deeply rooted fear of Black men doesn’t have a resolution, or much deeper exploration in the original text. In a novel about self reflection, self-acceptance and growth, this is hard to reconcile. The series does better. The racial dimensions of Queenie’s pain and fears were at the center of some online discourse in 2019 and, in the leadup to the premiere, some with knowledge of the story raised similar questions on social media in reaction to the Queenie trailer.
When talking with NPR for this piece, Carty-Williams pointed out that when readers have been in conversation about her debut, they tend to ask how Queenie did what she did. She pushes back wondering why the onus is on the woman rather than asking why men behave how they do toward Queenie. She also disclosed that the series allowed her to better resolve Queenie’s difficulties with men in her community partly, but not exclusively, through her relationship with her best friend’s cousin Frank. Carty-Williams said that this exploration was inspired both by conversations with readers and by her own maturation. Now in her 30s, she says she better understands attachment disorder, and how fears and triggers manifest, than when she started writing the novel at 26. In this way, the story of the making of Queenie-the-series has a happier ending — giving Queenie more room to grow.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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