THE ROUGH SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Atlanta’s former mayor writes of a sometimes difficult but aspirational childhood and its enduring lessons.

In an autobiography in the campaign genre, for she’s now running for governor of her native Georgia, Bottoms writes of growing up on what in the Black church is called “the rough side of the mountain”—rough, to be sure, but, as she quotes Aretha Franklin as saying, “the smooth side doesn’t have anything for you to hang on to.” Bottoms’ family life was tumultuous. In a climactic moment of the book, her father, an influential but troubled R&B singer, is taken off to prison for selling drugs. Left to provide for her family, her mother launches a beauty salon, while Bottoms knuckles down and, through dint of hard work, becomes a consistently high-scoring honor student, later attending an HBCU and earning a law degree. “As a product of the Atlanta Public Schools in the 1970s and 1980s, I hadn’t had exposure to many integrated spaces,” she writes, but her varied work in what she called “the People’s Law” gave her a view of the whole metropolis, one with marked inequalities and plenty of neighbors in need of help. She ran for city council, perhaps one of the few candidates in any race whose foundational question was “Is all well with my soul?” Later, she ran for mayor, tested in the wake of the George Floyd killing by the police shooting of a young Black man at an Atlanta fast-food restaurant that drove yet another wedge into a divided community. Bottoms served only one term, believing that too many politicians stay in office past their prime. Her candor isn’t entirely unusual, but it’s still good to read that, rather than try to hide away her “blemished family past,” she unhesitatingly steps up to bear witness to it.

A well-crafted memoir of private struggles and public service.