Memoir writer. Expat. Millennial. Sarcastic as hell. Black & female. Survived love, loss, and trauma—now turning it into two raw, funny, heartfelt books.
This is just a teaser…but keep reading to see the real cover of Extraordinary Machine!
The Big (Stupid?) Idea: Do It All Myself
When I first started writing my memoir, I had this brilliant stupid idea: I was going to do everything myself. Yes, including the book cover.
I figured—why not? I had some basic Photoshop skills, a decent eye for design, and a working knowledge of Canva thanks to my Sims modding days. So I turned to AI and generated an image for the cover of Extraordinary Machine.
It wasn’t great.
Garbled Text and a Messy Heart
The original AI mockup of my concept for the Extraordinary Machine book cover.
While I loved the floral aesthetic and the concept: a mechanical heart surrounded by gears, the final image looked messy. And AI, at the time, wasn’t great at rendering readable text; it has actually improved in the months since then.
I spent two hours in Canva trying to make it work. But eventually, I had to face the truth: this wasn’t my lane. My lane is storytelling. I needed help from someone with artistic talent.
Finding Help: Enter Reedsy (and Avoiding Fiverr Fails)
I discovered Reedsy, a platform that connects writers with freelance professionals, including cover designers, editors, audiobook narrators, and more. The process is simple:
Write a pitch for your book
Choose five professionals whose work speaks to you
Wait and hope that at least one replies, fits your budget, and vibes with your vision
I also checked out Fiverr, but it was a no for me. While there are some legit artists on there, it’s also flooded with scammers and Canva bandits passing off stolen work. I literally saw someone using a Toni Morrison cover in their portfolio. Absolutely not.
Love at First Scroll: Finding Nick Low
Artwork by Nick Low for YEVU Clothing’s 2021 fundraising campaign supporting LGBT+ Rights Ghana. Inspired by the photography of Joseph Abbey-Mensah.
On Reedsy, I found five artists I liked—but one stood out immediately. Nick Low, an American expat living in Sydney, just like me.
His art was stunning: vibrant, emotional, and rich with depictions of Black women and joy.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before picking an illustrator. Still, I realised in that moment that it was meaningful to collaborate with a fellow person of colour on something as personal as my memoir about my life.
And I realised that even if Nick didn’t take the job, I still thought that I’d love to buy his artwork and hang it in my apartment.
I sent him my pitch. He replied within a few hours. He got it—all of it. The heart of the story, the symbolism of the mechanical heart, and the shared experience of being people of colour in Australia. His price was fair, and his energy was warm. Still, I did my due diligence and waited to hear from others.
Only one other artist from Reedsy replied and immediately talked down to me. While I was transparent about this being my first book, he was oddly condescending and treated me as if I were an idiot.
Nick, on the other hand, treated me like a creative equal.
Collaboration Magic: Building the Cover
Saying yes to Nick was one of the best decisions I’ve made so far on this self-publishing journey.
He was patient, kind, and intuitive. He never once made me feel foolish or inexperienced. We worked collaboratively; he created the initial mockups, and from there, we refined the design together through several iterations.
And then… the final version arrived.
I cried.
Why This Cover Means So Much
Writing Extraordinary Machine has been a painful, healing, raw, and empowering experience. It’s a memoir about my trauma, my mother, my Nana, and my becoming. There have been days when I’ve questioned everything, as recently as this weekend.
But one thing that has kept me going is the image in my head: me, holding this book in my hands.
That image got me through the hard chapters. And now, thanks to Nick’s incredible talent, that image is real.
Meet the Artist
Nick Low is a brilliant painter and illustrator!
Please support him and follow his work on Instagram at @NickLowPaints, visit his website here, or explore his Reedsy profile if you’re a creative looking for stunning artwork.
I can’t wait to fill my apartment with some of his art.
The Reveal: Extraordinary Machine Cover
The official cover of Extraordinary Machine: A Memoir of Trauma and Resilience by Brittany Brown. Illustrated by Nick Low.
Final Thoughts: Let Yourself Be Helped
To my fellow writers, artists, and stubborn DIY-ers: you don’t have to do it all alone (I wrote more about this here: DIY vs. Outsourcing: What I’m Doing Myself for My Memoir (and What I’m Not)). Let those who are brilliant in their respective fields do their thing. You’ll end up with something better than you ever imagined, and you’ll make meaningful connections along the way.
This book is my heart. And now, it has a face.
✨ Want to Follow the Journey?
Extraordinary Machine is still in progress—but the heart is beating and the story is coming to life.
If you want a front-row seat to the writing process, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, or just want to cheer me on as I build this dream:
While the memoir mainly focuses on my relationship with my mom, this chapter looks at a quieter, unexpected relationship that took time, awkward meals, and a shared dislike of peas to develop into something meaningful.
When my Nana (my grandmother on my mom’s side) married Perry, I wasn’t ready for him. He wasn’t Johnny, the warm grandpa I was used to. Perry was quiet and reserved and didn’t seem interested in the role I expected him to play. I wasn’t very excited about letting him into my life, either.
But as you’ll see in this excerpt, connections have a way of happening unexpectedly. Through small gestures, surprise laughter, and a surprise Goosebumps box set, Perry became more than Nana’s new husband—he became my grandpa.
A Substitute Grandpa
I initially hated my Grandpa Perry.
“I want Johnny!” I remember crying during my first overnight stays with them while they danced to soul music in the living room. It was one of the few times I saw them show affection.
From my perspective, Johnny had just disappeared. He wasn’t just anyone; he was Nana’s long-term boyfriend and the closest thing I’d ever had to a grandfather. I’d grown up with him, wrapped in his unconditional love and impossibly spoiled. So when I met Perry, and Nana told me she and Johnny had broken up, I felt blindsided. I was only seven, and either I was too young to understand the details, or Nana left them out entirely.
All I could think was, ‘What happened to my beloved Johnny, with his warm hugs and Gatorade? Why wasn’t he with us here? I hadn‘t even had a chance to say goodbye. And why had he been replaced with this beer-bellied, boring man who spent all his time glued to ESPN?’
Perry never seemed to get over my first tearful outburst. So, he approached me carefully.
He seemed exhausted by the mere idea of me. His kids were around my mom’s age; one daughter lived in San Francisco with her partner and had no kids, and I think his son was estranged. He hadn’t been around a child my age outside of a classroom in years. He only knew how to connect with me when I got bored enough to flip through his old yearbooks. I’d sit at the kitchen table, pointing to random faces.
“Did you know this person?”
“Yes,” he’d grumble, barely looking up from the football game.
Eventually, though, we bonded—over Nana’s cooking, of all things. She was an incredible cook, but she had a habit of deciding the menu every night without consulting us. She’d always pile my plate high with peas, even though I hated them. She’d do the same to Perry despite him being a grown man and hating them, too.
“I said I didn’t want any peas,” he’d mumble, shifting them around on his plate.
“Well, too bad,” she’d matter-of-factly reply as she sat down to eat.
One night, I tried to hide my peas under my mashed potatoes. As I poked at my plate, I saw something soft hit the table. I looked up to see Perry doing the same thing: hiding his peas. One had escaped and rolled onto the table.
We locked eyes and laughed. Quietly at first, then uncontrollably. Nana looked up, her face brightening with a smile. “What are you two laughing about?”
“Nothing, right, Brittany?” Perry said, winking at me.
“Yeah, nothing,” I giggled back, pushing another pea under my potatoes.
Perry figured out that I loved to read. One Christmas, he surprised me by handing me a gift he had bought himself, not something Nana had purchased, and he had put his name on.
My hands trembled as I unwrapped the box, and then I saw it: the complete set of Goosebumps books. I held them like they were fragile, my fingers running over the colourful spines.
I glanced at Perry. He stood awkwardly by the dining room table, anxiously watching my reaction, his hands nervously stuffed in his jeans pockets.
I rushed towards him, enveloping him in a hug, wrapping my arms tightly around that beer belly I once hated. “Thank you, Perry,” I said sincerely, my eyes wet with tears of happiness.
It was the first time I hugged him. He hugged me back, hesitantly at first and then tighter.
Though he was retired, Perry occasionally worked as a substitute teacher. One morning, I walked into my third-grade classroom, and to my surprise, I saw him sitting behind the desk.
He winked at me; I winked back.
At recess, he pulled me aside. “I didn’t know I’d be in your class until this morning. Don’t tell anyone you know me. I don’t want them thinking I’m playing favourites.”
He still looked proud whenever I raised my hand to answer a question. After lunch, though, I overheard some girls giggling about him.
“He’s so boring,” one said. “I think he fell asleep during class!” another laughed.
My face burned. “Shut up,” I muttered.
“Why? He’s weird!”
“He’s not weird!” I yelled, tears streaming down my face, my hand balling into a fist at my side. “He’s my grandpa!”
So, the secret at school was out: my grandpa was our substitute teacher.
But, more significantly, it was the first time I’d referred to Perry as my grandpa.
My mother always taught me to be proud of being Black—but also to know the world wouldn’t always see me as I saw myself. This photo, with her wearing a ‘Jesus Is a Black Man’ shirt, captures so much of what she instilled in me. This moment, and many like it, shaped the memoir I’m writing today.
My mother taught me many things—some I carry with me, and some I’ve rejected. One of the biggest life lessons was about race, identity, and survival.
She wanted me to be proud to be Black, but she also wanted me to know that being Black meant the world wouldn’t always see me as I saw myself.
And so, she prepared me the best way she knew how.
Code-Switching and Other Race Lessons from Mom
Mom taught me a lot about race. Obviously, we’re Black. We should be proud to be Black. We’re descended from Africa, Jesus was a Black man, we have the best music, the most rhythm, the best fashion sense, and the most fabulous hair—and everyone in society wants to copy us.
But there was also this underlying (and sometimes blatant) feeling of not wanting to be Black—at least, not the “typical“ kind of Black. There was this constant reframing of our Blackness—we’re Black, but we’re not that kind of Black. We speak proper English. We’re well-educated. We don’t live in the ‘hood. We’re not ghetto.
“Life is hard enough because we’re Black,” she’d explain. “Don’t give anyone a reason to make it harder.”
It was confusing as a child. We were Black and proud, but my mom dyed her hair honey-blonde and spoke like a white woman when she took important phone calls.
From a young age, Mom drilled into me the art of code-switching long before I knew there was a name for it. It started with my name, actually. Mokie picked it out—she was 12 and named me after her favourite Alvin and the Chipmunks character, naturally—but Mom co-signed it because it sounded like a white name. How many Black girls do you know named Brittany? I don’t know any.
Mom said a white-passing name was ideal for navigating our world. I’d never have a teacher stumble over my name like they did the LaShauntas and Creontas in my class. Most importantly, when I got older, I’d never have a future employer skip over my résumé, deciding they didn’t want Jhermanique working in their corporate office.
“There’ll never be a President Shaniqua,” she’d say smugly. “But there can be a President Brittany Brown.”
Then there was how to speak. Mom drilled it into me young: When we’re out in public with normal people, don’t use slang, speak politely, and bump your tone up a few octaves so you sound pleasant and unopposing. Not that lower timbre I’d naturally use.
I saw her do it firsthand—when she was on the phone late at night, laughing with her best friend, Anita, it was all, “Girrrrrl!” and “Ain’t that some bullshit!”
But at my school’s parent-teacher conferences? She was dignified and refined—she sounded like a meek white secretary. “It’s so lovely to meet you, Mr. Mayer; Brittany speaks highly of you as her teacher.”
Looking back, it kind of makes me sad—being told I could be myself but also not be myself. That the way I was born, the way everyone else who looked like me existed, was something that needed to be hidden or masked.
But I know it came from a place of experience, of wanting to shield me from the things she’d faced. And it’s probably a much more universal experience than I realised. We all know the world is harder when you’re a minority. And in the United States—a country built on the backs of enslaved Black people? It was even harder.
When Nana, Troy, and Mom first bought a home in Bakersfield, it was the early ’70s—technically past the Jim Crow era, after Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. But racism didn’t just disappear because laws changed. The KKK still burned a cross on their lawn. They still threw a rock through their window. Parts of Bakersfield were still segregated for much of Mom’s childhood.
So I understood she was trying to protect me.
It just didn’t work.
Mom placed me in predominantly white schools growing up. It was intentional—they had better facilities and curriculum, and I think, in her eyes, less chance of me falling in with the wrong crowd.
But I was always the odd one out. The one Black kid in a sea of white and beige. I didn’t belong with them, and they were sure to remind me.
“Eww, why is your hair like that? It looks like snakes,” some girl sneered about my braids in 5th or 6th grade.
Another time, a girl grabbed the end of my braids and noticed the tip was burnt—that’s what you do to hair extensions to keep them from unravelling. “Oh my God, did you burn your hair?!” she gasped, nose wrinkled in disgust.
“It’s not my real hair….” I muttered, pulling my braid back.
“It’s not?! Did you shave someone’s hair and put it in yours?”
“No,” I sighed, exhausted, even though I was only nine. “They’re called extensions. It’s fake hair.”
One day, a boy floated over at the local pool with a cheeky grin. “Brittany, I think one of your braids fell out!” he teased.
Mortified, I looked over at his hand, but he held up a stick.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Black kids didn’t accept me either.
Usually, the white schools Mom enrolled me in weren’t in our neighbourhood, so she’d use a friend’s address or whatever loophole she could find to get me in.
But one year, she couldn’t cheat the system. She had to enrol me at the local school after our latest move. The duplex we lived in was in the ghetto (and I truly mean ghetto—our unit was overrun with cockroaches, instilling a lifelong fear in me, and there was a drive-by shooting a few blocks away just weeks after we moved in). The school was predominantly Black.
These weren’t Black kids taught to code-switch. They weren’t named after ’80s cartoon characters. And they did not like me at all.
“Why you talk like a white person?” a girl bluntly asked me on my first day.
“I don’t know…I just…talk this way.”
Soon, a little clique of girls started a rumour that I thought I was better than them because I was bookish, well-spoken, and “acted white.”
One girl, in particular, hated me. She’d mutter threats in class under her breath, throw things at me when the teacher wasn’t looking, and one day after school, she tried to jump me. She followed me home, taunting me and throwing things at my back.
Crying, I went home to my mom and told her. “The Black kids hate me. The White kids hate me.”
A few weeks later, she pulled me out of the school, and we moved again. “This neighbourhood is too ghetto, anyway.”
I never got away from this feeling.
I had a brief reprieve at the start of high school in Sacramento. I got into a gifted school with smart, well-spoken Black kids like me, whose parents also taught them how to code-switch.
I joined the Black Student Union and made my first real Black friends. Our school was diverse. We weren’t judged for being Black—not by each other, not by the other kids. We could be Black and also like rock music. Or watch Jackass. Or date white kids and no one cared.
But then we moved to Reno.
Reno is a very white place. If you see a Black person in public, it’s rare.
My high school had—maybe—five black kids. Two of them were related to one another.
There was no BSU. No real sense of belonging. There wasn’t overt racism, but
microaggressions were constant.
“I forget you’re Black sometimes. You’re just like us!” one of my (white) best friends told me, meaning well.
When I was in college, two older Latina women at work listened to rock music as we prepped the restaurant for opening.
“You know this song?” Betty asked incredulously as she heard me sing along.
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging as I peeled an onion. “I like this kind of music.”
Betty turned to Rosa, and they said something to each other in Spanish. Despite my four years of Spanish in high school, I couldn’t decipher it, but I could tell by their tone and the sassy looks on their faces that they were gossiping about me.
Laughing awkwardly, I asked Rosa, “Hey, what are you saying about me?”
Rosa set aside the lettuce she was working on and grinned ruefully. “Oh, nothing…Betty was just saying she didn’t know Black people liked this music. And I said you’re not really Black anyway.”
My ears grew hot. I wanted to ask, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” But another of my mom’s lessons was respectability politics. Push it down. Don’t be the stereotypical angry Black woman they expect you to be.
I just shrugged, said I liked all kinds of music, and returned to peeling the onions.
But later, I cried.
It wasn’t until 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter forced these conversations back to the forefront, that I felt brave enough to address anything publicly.
I made a Facebook post:
“The microaggressions (intentional or not) lead to bigger hatred, reinforcement of negative stereotypes, selfishness, ignorance. Those ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ comments continue to lead to diminishment, ignorance, and bigotry…flat-out racism. I can’t tell you the amount of ‘little’ things people have said to me (yes, even some of you I’m friends with on this very site) that were racially insensitive, hurtful, and based on stereotypes. I’ll give some examples:
People commenting on the way I talk. ‘You sound so well-educated.’
‘You act so white.’ Been told this my whole life.
There are so many more examples, but I’m mentally and emotionally tired.”
It got a lot of reactions. A lot of heartfelt ones. Some of the people who replied were guilty, thinking I was referring to them when I wasn’t. Some friends I had been talking about acknowledged it. Some ignored it completely.
That’s fine.
I wasn’t trying to assuage their white guilt anyway.
But Mom was always right—life is harder when you’re Black.
She never told me that sometimes, it’s hardest when you don’t fit into anyone’s expectations of what that means.
