Description

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother s home, she returnsto California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother s memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father s field for pennies a bushel, to her parents involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions–between her family s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future–will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and ecstatic possibility, and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God s plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet s precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home–