OUR SONG

Hoggan describes her hopes of rekindling an interracial college romance that failed decades earlier in this debut memoir.

In 1972, the author, who is White, met a Black basketball player who’d been recruited to play for a “small white college” in her hometown in Pennsylvania. (In this memoir, she calls him Jonathan “JT” Thomas, which is not his real name; other details about him are also fictionalized.) Hoggan was already dating Will (also not his real name), a Black Philadelphian who was overseas in England, studying at Durham University. However, from the moment she was introduced to JT, she couldn’t forget his “dancing eyes.” Their love “took off like a wildfire,” she says, but Hoggan’s college was hours away in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, so the two mainly communicated by mail. Hoggan shares fragments of these letters while explaining why the relationship didn’t work out: bigoted parents, interfering friends, and communication breakdowns. Forty-one years later, in 2014, after marrying and divorcing Will, Hoggan found an opportunity to reconnect with JT, but would their feelings for one another remain the same? The memoir is thoughtfully punctuated with music references that help to locate the mood of each moment. The author’s style is relaxed and conversational in tone: “And oh, did I have yearnings of my own. Like the Valentine’s Day that came and went, and I had no Valentine to kiss me.” Hoggan is also a very candid writer, as when she describes losing her virginity to a fellow teenager named Curtis. However, the text ventures precariously into colorism when discussing JT’s skin being a “little less dark” than Will’s: “Was I unable to let go of European standards of beauty, or did his look just seem a little closer to my own tribe?...I didn’t really care. I just wanted him.” Still, this memoir effectively outlines the difficulties faced by those involved in interracial relationships in the 1970s.

An earnest but unevenly executed relationship remembrance.