Talk to Me

Lessons from a Family Forged by History

By: Rich Benjamin

Narrated by: Rich Benjamin

A piercingly powerful memoir, a grandson’s account of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and his urgent efforts to know his mother despite the past.

“A brilliant, absorbing book...I couldn’t stop reading.” —Salman Rushdie, author of Knife

Rich Benjamin’s mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country’s president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle’s parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.

Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn’t know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about—books, learning, world events—the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.

It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn’t just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America—of the human cost of the country’s hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.

©2025 Rich Benjamin (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A brilliant, absorbing book, a family story, a tale of power, exile, and calamity, a love letter to Benjamin’s mother that becomes a deep look into the darkness of Haitian history. And it’s also a no-holds-barred autobiography. I couldn’t stop reading.”—Salman Rushdie, author of Knife

"Talk to Me is a revelation. As unflinching as it is tender, it is the story of a nation and an intimate portrayal of a family. Rich Benjamin meticulously probes into Haiti's vast history while sensitively revealing with the painful secrets that his mother and her sisters carried to America. This is a son's homage to a complex, brilliant woman and a letter of longing to a Haiti that might have been, and could still become."—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize

“Talk to Me is a tour-de-force! I was gripped by every page of this meticulously researched and emotionally rich mother-son memoir, which explores how one family is unmade and remade—again and again—by forces both external and internal. Rich Benjamin is a supremely talented writer, able to convey complex subject matters—the political landscape of Haiti, the parental abandonment that shaped him, and his reckoning with sickle cell anemia, being gay, and numerous family secrets—in elegant and moving prose. You will not be able to put it down!”—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Little Monsters