This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing.
A poet and novelist chronicles years of extraordinary love and loss.
Opening her memoir with an image of her hennaed hands on her wedding day in 2021, Griffith shares the sense of amazement she felt as she prepared to “exchange vows with a wondrous man, a man I’ve called my ‘boyfriend’ for the past four years. My ‘boyfriend’ is three decades older than me. My ‘boyfriend’ is older than my father. My ‘boyfriend’ is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.” The one off-key note on the day the author became Salman Rushdie’s fifth wife was the unexplained absence of her best friend of 17 years, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was supposed to speak at the wedding. The ceremony was not long over when Griffiths learned her friend had died that morning. Much of what follows is devoted to charting the path of this cherished friendship, from their meeting as grad students at Sarah Lawrence and finding joy in music, dancing, food, and poetry to their shared rage and sorrow during the pandemic and in the period following the death of George Floyd. “The inhumanity of Floyd’s murder ravaged America’s bloodstained roots. Memories surfaced like warped bruises. America’s history was a vicious scab, reopened and raw….Had we honestly ever believed that America would put down her guns and her nooses?” Not a full year after her friend’s death came Griffiths’ husband’s near-fatal stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. This section of the narrative revisits the chilling details of Rushdie’s difficult, almost miraculous recovery, also recounted in his memoir, Knife. In the final section, the author finds her way into the creative project that will release her from these multiple traumas, beginning by immersing herself in the archives of “literary foremothers” like Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Alice Walker.
This profoundly felt account moves between the raw, the lyrical, and the elegiac as it seeks the light of healing.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593730201
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.
“Not a Cinderella story.”
Baldwin’s loosely written memoir is about motherhood and pregnancy loss, marriage to a celebrity, being the target of gossip and criticism, the experiences of neurodivergency and bilingualism, and more. “When Alec and I met, I was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three,” she writes. “Now, it’s nearly a decade and a half later….People always ask me: What is life actually like with seven kids (and an Alec)? It’s amazing and chaotic.” This book comes on the heels of the first season of the family’s reality show, The Baldwins, seemingly designed to answer the same burning question. While the author seems like a nice, well-meaning person, one comes away from this memoir hoping the television version, with the story sculpted by professionals, is the more entertaining response. Given the fact that there has been controversy about Baldwin’s background, perhaps she should have written a straightforward autobiography. But she has not, and the reader might need to do some research to understand the nature of some of the attacks she writes about. The veracity of her Spanish identity has come under fire, as her birth name is Hilary, she was born in Boston, and is not of Latine descent—but you won’t learn those facts from this book. The author’s relative youth, her choice to have her sixth child via surrogate, and Alec Baldwin’s involvement in the death of a colleague on a film set have all been media fodder. She discusses several specific nemeses without naming them, which is not very interesting. “I grapple with the question: Why am I here in the public space? Why am I ‘relevant’? Am I here because an actor fell in love with me? Am I here because I’m a yoga teacher and have things to say about mental and physical health? Am I here because I had a lot of kids?” It’s not clear that she knows, and neither will you.
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668009987
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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