A perceptive memoir about race, love, and legacy.
Longing for a baby, a woman discovers her family’s gnarled history.
In this intimate and candid memoir, Jackson—a professor of English, writer on race and literature, and co-author of The Toni Morrison Book Club—recounts two grueling experiences: undergoing a lengthy period of in vitro fertilization beginning when she was 36 and, at the same time, painfully probing family mysteries. Why, she wonders, do she and her older sister look so different? What happened in the car crash that killed so many in her father’s family, including his first wife, mother, sister, and 4-year-old niece, for whom Jackson was named? Both of her desires—for a child and for answers to gnawing questions—became as obsessive as they were frustrating, and both were entangled with issues of race. Jackson suffered insensitive treatment by physicians, nurses, and therapists, Black and White, old and young. One Black doctor assured her that Black women have no problems with fertility, unlike White women. Indeed, in the Alabama town where she grew up, there were many teenage mothers, including a 15-year-old who had her brother’s son. “Poor Black girls have babies because nobody expects them to do anything else,” Jackson observes. Near her home in New Jersey, the sight of a pregnant Black teenager elicits “envy and disgust” that the girl has what she, an educated, professional Black woman, is struggling for. Jackson reveals her desperation when repeated hormone treatments yielded few eggs; and when those eggs were fertilized, pregnancies failed. She found herself grieving the loss of embryos, just as she had been grieving her lost relatives, “people whose ghosts have haunted us ever since I can remember being alive.” The author creates vivid portraits of her stoic, irreverent, and warmhearted father; her judgmental, pragmatic mother; and her supremely patient and loving husband. Though the book’s subtitle gives away the happy ending, tension never flags.
A perceptive memoir about race, love, and legacy.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593490020
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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