A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women

The brilliant Wajahat Ali, author of Go Back to Where You Came From, and playwright of The Domestic Crusaders, had me on The LeftHook to share my new book A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women: 20 Steps to Find Your Purpose and Power in a World on Fire. Watch or listen to the full discussion on how to overcome the very real and urgent threat of fascism. (Side note: In France, Marine Le Pen is campaigning for president wearing an ankle monitor, following in the footsteps of her fellow Russian asset, the convicted felon/Epstein wing-man).

Trump is doing to our country what he did to the East Wing of our White House. How do we rebuild from the wreckage? That's what A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women is about. It's for anyone tired of Steve Bannon trying to demoralize us and flood the zone with sh*t. It's about concrete steps to stay grounded and focused in a world of chaos, to align your deepest needs and dreams with a higher purpose, creating world domination for the collective good.

My own journey begins with being raised on stories of the government trying to kill you, and blame you for the crime, helped by Western corruption to cover-up the torture and murder. I am of course speaking of my Ukrainian heritage and the Holodomor, Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. In all my years of studying my family's history and the two monsters, Hitler and Stalin, who drove that history, I look back on America's own, and see the authoritarianism that established this country. The white supremacy blood lust terrorizing Black Americans, Native Americans, mass discrimination and violence against immigrants, and the list goes on. Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, and too many others carry on that violent legacy. That's why they're aligned with the Kremlin, which sees Ukrainians as inferior.

In Ukrainian culture, we're taught to fight for our very lives, our voice, our art, our culture, our language, because no one else will. They want to erase us, so we must do the opposite and shine, shine, shine. In Ukrainian culture, art is literally survival. The coded language of poetry preserves historical truth, our shared humanity, our courage and defiance.

Life is incredibly stubborn. Creativity is how we fortify our resilience. A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women provides 20 concrete steps for women–who are the favorite target of fascists, because they fear the fight in us–and their allies–to dream big for themselves and the kind of world we want to live in. That is how we reset the culture, overcome their darkness with our light, and gather our people to create a better world. We are the alternative to their dystopian vision for our future, a future that belongs to us.

To better get to new my new and most personal book, I put together this Q&A:

Empowerment can be a privilege. Many nonwhite women, especially immigrants, are juggling several jobs just to survive. How does this book make space for different lived experiences

A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women is based on my own lived experience of being raised in a Ukrainian immigrant family. My grandmothers both worked as maids to survive. So I take nothing for granted when it comes to the diversity of demands on women today. Throughout the book, I share wisdom and insights from women across history. There's also a recommended reading guide in the book, featuring an incredible list of women authors, like Mikki Kendall and trans activist Raquel Willis. I also share a troubling story about a Black mentor telling me to get a white man to join me for my pitch meetings and just sit there. I'm sad to say it did make a difference.

Planting seeds of hope and change – whether that's through launching a dream project like a film, book, business, non-profit, or some other ambitious goal – can be a grind. Does this book highlight organizations on the frontlines doing that unglamorous work in the shadows, helping us build that collective power?

Yes, absolutely! And I made sure that the blurbs (endorsements) featured at the front of the book included voices from grassroots groups, to promote their efforts to a wider audience. Julie Delaurier of Rise and Resist began as an organizer in ACT UP and helped organize Tesla Takedown and No Kings. She also organizes to track and resist ICE raids in NYC. She read the book and provided a heartfelt endorsement. So did civil rights leader Maya Wiley, President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Holley Atkinson of the grassroots group the Media and Democracy Project bringing legal challenges to the existence of Fox News.

Isn't self-help ego-driven?

A Reasonable Guide is all about collective action. Individual choices produce collective action. Think of A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way meets Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. Self-knowledge isn't the end goal here; it's the foundation for knowing where you can make an impact. It cites women across movements and their advice on how to stay creative and build power in a time of mass destruction.

But isn't this focus on the self just new age nonsense which is a slippery slope to fascism, given reports of new age online movements being breeding grounds for fascist cult recruitment?

This book follows an ancient tradition of taking on an empire with the power of ideas. Ideas cannot be killed. And you cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

Know thyself was popularized by the ancient Greeks, most famously by Socrates who was a champion of women for that time. The Greeks were conquered by the sadistic and corrupt Roman Empire. A couple hundred years later, the Greeks conquered them right back through the power of self-knowledge and ideas. Greek became the dominant language of the Roman Empire. Self-knowledge is not ego. The book walks you through steps to think creatively and conquer doubt in order to build meaningful collective action.

I had to produce my film Mr. Jones myself because no one wanted it. Mr. Jones was a film to bring historical justice and truth to a massive genocide by the Kremlin, covered up for generations, including with the help of Western corruption. A former Ambassador to Ukraine called Mr. Jones Ukraine's Schindler's List. A screening was shut down in Moscow, and Memorial, Russia's once largest NGO that dared to screen it, was liquidated. There were death threats and harassment during the making of the film, but still the team and I fought on, holding on to the power of our creativity and voices. That is what A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women is about: remembering the power of your voice in a world that wants to silence you and kill you. It's also a damn good time.

I hope you will consider checking it out and pre-ordering A Reasonable Guide for Unreasonable Women, which helps build buzz in the industry and gets the word out. Thank you to everyone who has supported my work over the years. It means so much.