It's hard for black women to ask for help. We think we don't need it. We're used to being in pain and living with it.

I think that fear came from, "Okay, I'm going to have Beyoncé in the title, and people are just going to think, it's Beyoncé poems. It's light and fun." I was kind of super-conscious of that. It's kind of like this weird trick I'm playing, where you're like, "What an interesting, fun cover, and then the name Beyoncé." Then you open it, and it's just about my depression. All of it belongs together.

So much of my writing process is trying to eliminate any kind of shame or fear of the thoughts that I'm having.

It's hard for black women to ask for help. We think we don't need it. We're used to being in pain and living with it.

I think there's something that's fascist [in Donald Trump's election], and something that I think we could probably learn from, in terms of the energy in the world right now.

There was something about Beyoncé that felt like a vessel, I guess, that I could kind of impose all of these feelings and thoughts onto. I was drawn to a little bit of a dichotomy between the glamour and celebrity and the very deep and complex legacy of black women, and what that means in terms of performance.

We kind of have to rewrite our own stories and our own ways of being free.