Read in Colour

Monday, March 30, 2015

Colorful Lit Alert, Spring 2015 - Autobiographies

Welcome to My Breakdown by Benilde Little
288pp
Publisher: Atria
Pub. Date: April 21, 2015

My mother was gone. I never thought I would survive her death.

A major bestselling novelist and former magazine editor, long married to a handsome and successful stockbroker with whom she has a beautiful daughter and son, Benilde Little once had every reason to feel on top of the world. But as illness, the aging of her parents, and other hurdles interrupted her seemingly perfect life, she took a tailspin into a pit of clinical depression.

Told in her own fearless and wise voice, Welcome to My Breakdown chronicles a cavern of depression so dark that Benilde didn’t know if she’d ever recover from what David Foster Wallace called “a nausea of the soul.” She discusses everything from her Newark upbringing, once-frequent visits to a Muslim mosque, and how it felt to date a married man, to her doubts about marriage, being caught between elder care and childcare, and ultimately how she treated her depression and found a way out.

Repost: Chat with Bernice McFadden for National Women & Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day

It's hard to believe that it's been five years since we sat down with Bernice McFadden and discussed her ebook, Keeper of the Keys, a moving short story of a young woman who considers suicide when she learns she has AIDS. Ms. McFadden brings home the powerful message of AIDS and its effect on the African American community, particularly women. In honor of National Women & Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, I'm reposting the transcript of that conversation.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

#BookReview (Audio): Disgruntled by Asali Solomon

Kenya Curtis is only eight years old, but she knows that she's different, even if she can't put her finger on how or why. It's not because she's black—most of the other students in the fourth-grade class at her West Philadelphia elementary school are too. Maybe it's because she celebrates Kwanza, or because she's forbidden from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Maybe it's because she calls her father—a housepainter-slash-philosopher—"Baba" instead of "Daddy," or because her parents' friends gather to pour out libations "from the Creator, for the Martyrs" and discuss "the community."
Kenya does know that it's connected to what her Baba calls "the shame of being alive"—a shame that only grows deeper and more complex over the course of Asali Solomon's long-awaited debut novel.

Disgruntled, effortlessly funny and achingly poignant, follows Kenya from West Philadelphia to the suburbs, from public school to private, from childhood through adolescence, as she grows
increasingly disgruntled by her inability to find any place or thing or person that feels like home.

A coming-of-age tale, a portrait of Philadelphia in the late eighties and early nineties, an examination of the impossible double-binds of race, Disgruntled is a novel about the desire to rise above the limitations of the narratives we're given and the painful struggle to craft fresh ones we can call our own.

304pp
Published: February 2015