I go to Japan, pulled like a magnet, to see what is mine, undiscovered or forgotten; to see what will never be mine; and to find some way to reconcile the two.
Tango is not a thing that can be done halfway. Neither, I learned, is memoir. You’re either all in, or you’re dishonest.
When Etty wrote to herself, I heard her speaking to me, and I took her words to heart.
“I think of McCarthy and ‘The Group,’ giving me language to understand myself before I even knew that’s what I needed.”
“There is a saying in book collecting: You only regret the books you don’t buy.”
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
I told Kingston how much her book meant to me as a half-Chinese woman, as a writer. It showed me my own life was worthy of examination, even exaltation.
“The best books show us who we were when we first read them, who we are now, and who we may yet become.”
“By reading the debut texts of the writers whose books I’ve at one point set down, I tried to find my way further into the work.”
“There are those who fail to realize how deeply Thompson cared about his country. He was a product of it.”
“I am three days aged in Lagos and cry as my fingers turn the first page.”
“Unlike most popular orphan characters, I wasn’t too young to remember my parents.”
Briggs didn’t create the monster lurking under the bed, he just told us it was there.
“My reading trajectory hadn’t equipped me with how I saw myself.”
“Through books, the best parts of me could breathe and be seen. No boy was going to fuck that up for me.”
A fan-pilgrim expects to find a special world, a sense of belonging. I just wasn’t sure what I’d find on Anne’s island.
We know the damage of othering. What about the ravages of Same-ing?
“Their Eyes Were Watching God is a timeless novel that shows us the resilience of the human spirit.”
“As a child, I swallowed the Nation’s ideology as easily as the Harlem residents Baldwin observed.”
“If I were writing a book about a movie, it would be Stand By Me.”
