Brandon Deyette is set to host a signing for his new book “Young is Blessed,” which he co-authored with tattoo artist and reality star Young Bae, at A Capella Books on March 8.
There will be an after party at Lore on Edgewood Ave. after the signing.
Young Bae stars on the VH1 show “Black Ink Crew: New York” and owns the shop Diamond Tattoos in New York City. But before she was a reality star, she was an artist struggling to get by. After escaping poverty and her abusive father in South Korea, she came to New York and built a creative and professional life for herself.
“Young is Blessed” is Young’s memoir. Looking back at her life, Young said she always knew she wanted to write a book.
“I know a lot of people have been through a lot more than I did, but I don’t know – It was just my calling,” she said. “It was something that I had in my heart forever.”
Young isn’t a writer by trade, so she knew she would need some help getting the words out on paper. She met with several ghost writers, but they just didn’t do it for her – the story ended up feeling like theirs instead of hers. One day, when she was fed up with the latest of the ghost writer applicants, she sent something they had written to Brandon Deyette – a local Atlanta filmmaker and a producer on “Black Ink Crew: New York.”
He also didn’t like what the ghost writer had done, and sent Young back a paragraph with an idea for how to make it better. She immediately asked him to come on board.
“He didn’t need to be my ghost writer,” she said. “He needed to be my co-writer, because he needs to be out there. He’s amazing.”
That was in 2019, but the pair started working on the book together in earnest during the 2020 pandemic. They would meet virtually for hours on end, Young talking and Deyette writing and asking questions. It ended up becoming like therapy of sorts, as Young worked through feelings she had kept locked away since childhood, and Deyette saw glimpses of his own story in hers.
“She was facing things that she hadn’t faced before,” Deyette said. “I was also reconciling things within myself through the writing.”
Most of the similarities in their stories came up surrounding their mothers. Young Bae had a difficult relationship with her mother growing up, but they have since patched things up. Deyette had a similar experience with his own mother. Young’s difficulties in her relationship with her mom revolve around her father’s abuse, while Deyette’s have to do with his mother’s relationship to his queerness.
“As she was going through her stories, my emotions were starting to come up,” he said. “Because there are a lot of similarities that happened in mine. Not exactly the same, but I know what the feeling is.”
Throughout the process, Young has been most worried about how her mother would feel about the book – so much so that the pair decided to cut out some of the more difficult aspects of their relationship. As a child, she learned not to expect anything from her abusive father, but because she did expect that love and care from her mother, it made any disappointments more difficult to bear. As an adult and now a mother herself, Young has reconciled with her mom, and understands that she did her best. According to Young, her mother’s family (who was very wealthy and cut her off when she married Young’s father) offered to take her back in if she left her husband and children. She didn’t go.
“I am forever grateful for my mom for that,” Young said. “She said no, and she stuck by us, and got beat up everyday. I could never take that away from my mom. My mom did her best.”
Deyette said that they hope readers find something to relate to in Young’s story, just as he did, and maybe feel a little less alone.
“What we’re hoping is that, when somebody reads this, there’s something within it that connects with them,” Deyette said. “They say, ‘Oh! That’s me.’”