Great Writer Fab! Ode to Bebe Moore Campbell

So this evening my agenda was to wash my hair after work...check. Twitter, jusssst a little...check. And catch up on my Twilight reading,on Eclipse, chp 5..TEAM EDWARD LOVE..check! lol. Anyhoo I put the book down for a second to catch up on some celeb gossip & saw a YBF blog post about Maia Campbell and how life is treating her a bit better. Maia Campbell(who played Tiffany on LL Cool J's 'In the house') has been dealing with bipolar mental illness exacerbated by a heavy drug addiction. I once heard the rumor that the former actress was on crack & meth. I was deeply saddened that all of this proved true after watching a youtube video that showed Campbell caught serving tricks in a car & spazzing out from either drugs, a bipolar episode, or a combo of both. Although I know that many of our beautiful black sisters deal with this it was just so stunning because I was a huge Campbell fan growing up..she was always so pretty to me on the show & I remember thinking many times while watching the episodes how I wished I had a smile and good hair like her, lol.

FYI...I'm a BIG Google girl & I can research for HOURS if given the time. Well in my researching I came across details that Maia Campbell was daughter to the late great author Bebe Moore Campbell. Now, call me stupid, but 1) I had NO idea really how great of an author Bebe was & 2)I had NO idea that she was Maia's mother. Sooo I started researching Bebe Moore Campbell..(you know google will do it to you everytime)..and was just in absolute awe of how amazing this woman was. Lots of her novels deal with families & the struggles they go through while dealing with the effects of mental illness. I went to Bebe's website & looked at all the books she's written. I want to get them ALL. I read about one of Bebe's personal tests but how she lived through it to make a wonderful testimony.

It seems one time Maia had a bipolar episode while staying at a hotel with her mom & went crazy, throwing all of Bebe's stuff out of the room. Just going wild & cussing her out. Bebe stated that this wasn't the first coo-coo for cocoa puffs episode, but she was in denial of her daughter's illness. She stated that she ignored all the signs when Maia was growing up & that it was hard for her as a black woman to accept the fact that mental illness was affecting her family, her life...her livelihood. But she leaned on a friend who recommended her to talk to a mutual friend, in which she did over the phone. This lead to a support group of seven women coming together twice a month to talk about & release the experiences that they were going through. That support group eventually gave them the push & drive to start their own division of the non-profit National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)for Urban LA. .

Sounds straight out of a novel, right? Hmmm...well Mrs. Bebe Moore Campbell & all her fabulosity let the sun break through her rainy clouds & put that .ish straight INTO a novel. Heck, a couple of novels. I absolutely can not WAIT to purchase and read '72 Hour Hold', 'Sweet Summer: Growing up with & w/o my Dad'..I'm even interested in seeing how she transitioned such a powerful issue of bipolar disease into 'Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry'...which is written on the baby-preschool level. I'm sure that the struggles Bebe went through, at the time she was experiencing it, she probably never thought in a million years that she could turn that illness...that weakness..into strength, into GREAT power, and produce GREAT novels. Her testimony PROVES that faith is truly the substance of things hoped for & the evidence of things not yet seen (Heb 1:11).

By the end of my researching I was nearly in tears. Mostly,from the sadness that I knew the Campbell family had and probably still are experiencing in dealing with Maia's mental illness. But I also felt tears of joy well up in the corners of my eyes because I was more excited than ever to KEEP doing what I love most...WRITE. My heart started to beat fast & my mind started to race because my mental juices were flowing again. I was already brainstorming of more dialogue, character, LIFE experience to put in the novel of my own. Just like Bebe, I want people to google my life one day, see the novels I put out and think 'dang Jewell may have had it hard in life at times, but she damn sure wrote a great book about it.' My grandmother is a diagnosed victim of the bipolar disorder...and my mother holds some traits of it as well. The up & down episodes truly confuse you as a child, one second you feel loved like no other, the next you don't. It was VERY hard for my sisters and I to live in a household like that. And even into my young adulthood, it is still VERY straining on my family. I have my small support group that I can talk to about the struggles in my family & one day, I too, will start a non-profit of my own to encourage others who may have had struggles like me. But like Bebe, I want to say a message and show that when life gives you lemons...hell, you make some oh so sweet lemonade!


"If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century -- except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Her writing is clean and clear; her emotions run hot, but her most important characteristic is uncompromising intelligence coupled with a perfectionist's eye for detail." -The Washington Post Book World


Yes sadly, Bebe made her transition after battling brain cancer at just 56 years old. But, her legacy lives on...http://www.bebemoorecampbell.com/index.php


Any author especially inspiring to you? Is there a connection between their life & their writing? What life statement do you want the world to know about your own writing? :)