Between the Trade Notice and the Memoir
Phases is a memoir about Brandy Norwood. It is also the first document out of her household to return fire at the press record around her mother.
A converted sunroom office in a house in Carson, California, around 1998. Three phones, a fax machine, a yellow legal pad with a fresh underline scored across the top of the page, and stacks of paper that doubled in volume by the week. The woman at the desk has her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose, the receiver pinned to her ear, and a pen tapping the line of a contract she means to revisit by lunch.
What she said into the phone, on one of the calls Brandy describes from the chair across the desk, was: “No, no, that’s not what we agreed to. The call time needs to be adjusted.” A few minutes later: “Listen, I appreciate that, but this is nonnegotiable. My daughter’s well-being isn’t something I’m flexible on.” Sonja Bates Norwood, the woman scribbling on the legal pad, had by then been managing her daughter Brandy’s career for five years and would manage it for nearly two more decades, which meant she was on that phone or one shaped like it for nearly every working hour she had.
Across the trade notices and tabloid items that ran from her daughter’s first record deal in 1993 through the Atlantic catalog disputes of the early 2010s, Sonja Norwood appeared as a difficult, pushy stage mom in trade reports, and as an aggressive one in the louder tabloids. That cluster of adjectives was an editorial choice, not a factual one. In the same window, inside those very same outlets, Mathew Knowles got called strategic. Tina Knowles got called regal. Kris Jenner trademarked momager (a single noun, monetized to seven figures) and turned it into the centerpiece of a TV empire. The split tracked across publications, quietly but consistently, with the race of the daughter whose career the mother in question was running.
Sonja Bates came up in McComb, Mississippi, a small pine-circled town in the southwestern corner of the state, and went on to study liberal studies and psychology at Southern University Baton Rouge. In her high school marching band, before any of that, she had been a baton twirler. The night she met Willie Norwood, his soul group, the Composers, was playing a packed Jackson club, and a few years later, when their oldest, Brandy, was four, the family moved to California so Willie could take a minister-of-music position at the Church of Christ in Inglewood. None of that biography, frankly, ever made it into the trade items that ran across her daughter’s career, and none of it would have shifted the adjectives anyway.
Phases, the memoir Brandy wrote with Gerrick Kennedy and published this March, is the first document out of the Norwood household that names the gap on the page. In the book, Sonja gets to be her own subject, apparently for the first time anywhere on the public record, with scenes she carries and a background that is sketched in rather than inferred from her child’s narration of her. The book is also where she gets to speak. Before the VIBE profile that became the most-read piece of journalism about Brandy in the late ‘90s, Sonja delivered a piece of counsel, practically in passing: “They’re not your friends, baby,” she said; “they’re doing a job.”
The Double Platinum negotiation described in that same chapter is where the two roles concentrate into one operating problem. ABC fast-tracked the made-for-TV movie under unusually compressed conditions, and Diana Ross had one nonnegotiable: she wanted to shoot in New York instead of the cheaper Toronto stand-in so she could be home in Connecticut with her kids in the evenings, and home with them for Christmas. A normal TV-movie shoot wants twenty days. The producers had seventeen, and Diana and Brandy’s schedules only overlapped for fourteen of those, which somehow had to absorb ninety percent of the film, including the choreographed musical numbers. Sonja’s job, that month, was to make those fourteen days workable for a teenager who was simultaneously still shooting Moesha five days a week. And the picture they were filming was a story about a singer who had chosen a music career over her own child and was paying for it twenty years later.
The chapter holding that scene lives inside the longest passage of self-accounting in the book. Brandy writes that her own pattern through her teens and twenties was to say yes to whatever landed at the door of the house in Carson—endorsements, film scripts, collaboration requests, brand campaigns, the constant traffic of a young pop singer whose face was on a Cover Girl billboard and a Mattel doll inside a single calendar year. She had not yet learned that no was a word she was permitted to use; the person saying it on her behalf was her mother. The labor of being the no, in an industry built on extraction from young Black girls, is its own job, and Sonja absorbed the retaliation for holding the line her daughter could not yet hold for herself.
When Sy’Rai was born in June 2002, Brandy and the baby’s father, Robert Smith, had publicly maintained they were married. Two years later, on Wendy Williams’s radio show, Smith claimed there had been no marriage at all. He laid it out for Williams: that Brandy had been the other woman, that he had reconciled with his actual girlfriend, and that Brandy’s mother had engineered the entire fabrication. The press cycle that followed, with trained reflex, turned Sonja into the architect of a hoax instead of the parent of a twenty-two-year-old who had panicked about the public’s reception of a Black pop star getting pregnant outside of marriage.
But Phases takes that cycle back. Brandy says, in print, that the lie was hers and the panic was hers. Sonja appears a few pages later on the night Brandy is sobbing in her kitchen after losing the Cover Girl deal, telling her that the noise does not matter and that the baby is what does.
The book’s dedication, addressed to Sy’Rai, is one sentence: “Continue to be a light.” Back in Carson, in the sunroom office where the conversation began, the phone is still ringing on the desk. Her receiver is still pinned to her ear. The legal pad, pages fanning onto the floor, sits open to a contract she meant to revisit before lunch. Brandy, age nineteen, curls up in the leather chair across the desk on her rare Tuesday off from Moesha, watching her mother. The call has not ended. Her mother, glasses pushed to the tip of her nose, has not hung up.