Changing Our Narratives through ‘Days of Our Lives’

1.
Just weeks before the presidential election, after the release of the recording in which Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women as he headed to the set of Days of Our Lives, my mother called me. While most people talked about the words that came out of a presidential candidate’s mouth, my mother didn’t mention Trump. Instead she said, “It’s Nicole! The woman in the video. It’s Nicole Walker from Days.”

My mother works from home, and as a kid I watched with her any weekday I wasn’t at school. The shows were so packed with golden-hued flashbacks, it was easy to catch up on what I missed. In our basement apartment, I witnessed glamorous women in mansions plot to destroy men who wronged them while my mother read the newspaper next to me on the couch we’d dragged in from the adjacent garbage room.