Andre

Quick Facts

• Role: Best friend, roommate, and creative confidant to Melina Green; aspiring playwright working at a casting agency
• First appearance: Modern timeline of the novel
• Identity: Black, gay (closeted for much of the story), impeccably stylish
• Signature choice: Submits Melina’s play to a festival under a male pseudonym, catalyzing the central plot
• Key relationships: Melina; his parents, Letitia and Darnell; the theater industry that both courts and misreads him

Who They Are

Boldly dressed and razor-sharp, yet quietly unsure of himself, Andre is both mirror and foil to Melina. He is her fiercest advocate and most honest critic, the one person who can tell her the work is missing a “beating heart” and then help her find it. But his devotion doubles as a mask: Andre’s humor and polish conceal a stalled creative life and the strain of remaining closeted at home. As a gay Black man navigating a field that tokenizes and sidelines, he understands systemic exclusion intimately—his decision to rename Melina as “Mel” isn’t just a prank; it’s a pointed (if reckless) experiment that exposes gendered gatekeeping while complicating their friendship. In this way, Andre embodies the book’s larger meditation on parallel marginalizations, bridging the struggles of Melina and historical figures like Emilia Bassano Lanier to show how visibility, authorship, and credit remain contested terrain.

Personality & Traits

Andre’s charisma and quick wit make him a scene-stealer, but his most defining quality is care—care for Melina’s work, for precision in taste and dress, and for controlling the story he and others tell about him. That control, however, often covers fear: fear of failing as a writer, fear of disappointing his parents, fear that the industry will never want his voice unless it’s attached to someone else’s.

• Supportive and loyal: He defends Melina in rooms where she’s dismissed and pushes her to take risks. He’s her first reader and truest believer, championing her talent even when she second-guesses herself.
• Witty and irreverent: Andre’s comedy is both balm and scalpel. He bonds with Melina over spiky pop-culture takes (calling Phantom of the Opera “uncomfortably rapey”) and cheekily dubs Jasper Tolle “sexy Voldemort,” humor that lightens the narrative while revealing his keen, slightly savage read on people.
• Piercingly perceptive: He spots the gap between craft and feeling in Melina’s early drafts, famously noting they’re “super polished” but lack a “beating heart”—critique that steers her toward emotional risk.
• Fashion-forward as armor: A Black man who is “always impeccably dressed,” he cultivates a flawless exterior that shields insecurity. His deadpan jab—“Do people who see you ever, like, offer you handouts?”—about Melina’s wardrobe underscores how he wields taste as both aesthetic and defense.
• Insecure (and self-effacing): He’s never finished a play, redirecting his creative force into buoying Melina. His long-standing decision to pretend she’s his girlfriend to placate his parents reveals how deeply fear shapes his choices.
• Impulsive: In a late-night mix of conviction and frustration, he deletes the “ina” from “Melina” and hits submit. The act is loving and reckless, born of belief in Melina and distrust of the system.

Character Journey

Andre begins in elegant stasis: close to the industry through casting, close to art through Melina, but safely at the edges of true risk. When Felix Dubonnet mistakes him for “Mel Green,” Andre is pushed onstage—literally and figuratively—to embody a success the system was unwilling to grant Melina. The ruse forces him to confront the hypocrisies he’s long observed: that the same institutions that marginalize him will applaud him when he’s fronting a woman’s work under a masculine mask. The resulting fissure with Melina—where he names his own invisibility and refuses to be only the sidekick—marks a pivot from caretaker to self-advocate. By the novel’s end, he claims authorship on his own terms: he comes out to his parents, enters a loving relationship, and develops his first play. The friendship with Melina endures, but now as a bond between two artists who can stand alone.

Key Relationships

• Melina Green: Their friendship is the novel’s beating heart: roommates, creative partners, and platonic soulmates. Andre’s candor shapes Melina’s growth, but the “Mel Green” deception exposes fault lines—who gets to be seen, who takes the heat, and who takes the bow. Their eventual reconciliation feels earned because both acknowledge how love and envy can coexist without canceling one another out.

• His parents (Letitia and Darnell): With them, Andre performs a version of himself that’s palatable—straight, partnered with Melina, steady at the casting office. This charade generates comedy and ache in equal measure. Coming out becomes an act of self-respect that ripples through his art; it’s the moment his personal story stops being a cover and starts being a claim.

• The industry (Felix Dubonnet as emblem): Felix’s eager misrecognition of Andre as “Mel” distills the theater’s bias: it will reward a masculine name and a charismatic presence even when the work belongs to someone else. Andre’s uneasy cooperation with the ruse reveals both his pragmatism and the cost of playing along.

Defining Moments

Andre’s most important scenes dramatize the tension between advocacy and appropriation, love and self-erasure—and show him learning to refuse the latter.

• Submitting the play as “Mel Green”: In a drunk, protective flash, he trims “Melina” to “Mel” and opens the door that would’ve stayed shut. Why it matters: The moment tests the system and proves it stacked—advancing the book’s arguments about Gender Inequality and the Silencing of Women’s Voices and Authorship, Identity, and the Fight for Recognition—while implicating Andre in the harm of the solution.

• The “Mel Green” meet-and-greet: Felix crowns Andre the playwright, and Andre doesn’t correct him. Why it matters: Andre steps into a role that flatters his charisma but estranges him from himself and from Melina, revealing how marginalization can tempt performance as survival.

• The rehearsal confrontation: Exhausted by the charade, Andre snaps: “You do not get to play the marginalized card... Not unless I get to play one, too.” Why it matters: He refuses to be merely Melina’s amplifier and insists that his own exclusions—racial, sexual, professional—count. It’s the birth of his artistic self-respect.

• Coming out to his parents: He ends the long-running lie that he and Melina are a couple. Why it matters: Honesty at home unlocks honesty in his work; the scene reframes family not as an obstacle but as a ground he can stand on.

• Lunch years later: He and Melina banter like old times; his play is in development; he’s partnered and proud. Why it matters: The arc closes not with apology but with parity—two artists, two lives, one durable friendship.

Essential Quotes

"It's like really good AI. Super polished, but without a beating heart."

Andre’s critique slices to the core of Melina’s early problem: immaculate craft without vulnerability. The metaphor positions him as both cultural omnivore and truth-teller, and it sparks the turn in Melina’s writing toward risk and feeling.

"If they’re going to call you a bitch no matter what, you might as well earn the title."

Here Andre reframes reputation as strategy. Rather than contorting to be likable, claim the agency—and the edge—that will get the work made. It’s advice born of living in bodies and identities judged before they speak.

"You were supposed to be mine, too."

A devastating confession that collapses friendship, romance, and chosen family into one longing. Andre names the cost of always being the support: he wanted a claim on success, on love, on authorship—not just proximity to it.

"You don’t see anyone clamoring for me to quit the casting agency and write."

This line exposes how encouragement is unevenly distributed. Andre identifies an industry and social circle that sees him as facilitator, not creator—an insight that propels him to demand opportunities instead of only making them for others.

"Envy is part of being human, Mel. You can be jealous of someone without taking that win away from them. It doesn’t have to be an or. It can be an and."

Andre offers a mature emotional grammar for friendship under ambition. By normalizing envy, he protects the bond from secrecy and shame, turning a potential fracture into a tool for honesty and growth.