It was Margo Jefferson, the great cultural critic, who first put my name in the
New York Times. In a review of another's book, in a closing paragraph, she made mention of something I'd penned in solitude and put forward with innocence and didn't even understand as well as she seemed to.
She looked up and saw me, and I, discovering her snatch of words quite by accident, never felt such gratitude.
When I read earlier this year that Margo had written a memoir called
Negroland, I wanted it at once, bought it when I could, and put it on the top of a pile called (in my mind), "the books you'll be allowed to read once you have completed your tour of duty with all known responsibilities."
Yesterday I was done with all known (until next week) responsibilities. I picked up
Negroland. I read.
And oh my, oh now: this. Like
H is for Hawk, like
M Train, like
My Life as a Foreign Country, Negroland is the kind of book that elevates not just its readers but the capital M Memoir itself. It's personal—and otherwise. It's I, You, We. It's inquiry, declaration, admission, confusion—the story of the impossible ideals, hurtful expectations, pleasant privileges, and chaotic undertows that have been all bound up with being a member of the black elite. It's a book by an esteemed critic who was "taught to distinguish (her)self through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off" and who then (but always judiciously, always for a higher purpose) allows us in.
In a book of anecdote, history, cultural expose, and yearning, we encounter, on almost every page paragraphs as searing as this:
Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren't looking.
And this:
Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.
This year, when my beautiful son goes into bookstores he goes straight (his mother's child) to the memoir shelves. He, like me, views memoir as one of the best chances we have of broadening our vision, breaking down our walls, stepping out of our recklessly limited world view.
I have been taught by Margo Jefferson with her gorgeous
Negroland. I have seen a little further. I have hurt a little more. I have been made grateful for both the seeing and the hurting.
Yesterday, on
Huffington Post, I wrote about
the importance of structure in memoir. How, indeed, considered structure makes memoir memoir. If we don't care about how the true story gets told, if we don't think broadly, innovatively, wisely about structure, we're only writing autobiography. Telling our story because it's interesting to us, because we feel like talking.
Patti Smith understands structure.
Indeed: How much did I love Patti Smith's utterly humble and humbling new memoir,
M Train?
TOOMUCHTOSAYTOOMUCHTOWRITETOOMUCHTOOMUCHTHATMUCH.
This is a star who moves quietly through this world, sitting at coffee shops, remembering and thinking. Never drops a name. Never boasts a moment. She is, and she takes us with her.
My thoughts on
M Train, in
New York Journal of Books, here.
I am in the midst of a most emotional summer, and I'm just letting that be. Not building walls around my feelings. Not afraid to sit and reel.
This afternoon I've been reading Patti Smith's new memoir,
M Train, due out in a few months. I will tell you right now that this book is fierce beauty if ever there was fierce beauty. This book is cloud sweep, glistened web, vast and aching, a room in which to cry. I can't say more than that for awhile now. Just. Oh, my goodness. This book.
I stopped in the midst of my reading to return to an interview Smith did with
Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, a few short years after Smith's beloved husband, Fred, passed away from heart failure. The interviewer has been speaking of how Smith "literally disappeared during the 1980s." Smith has talked about the greatness of that period, how the couple traveled America, lived in cheap hotels, loved. He would study flying. She would write poems and stories the world wouldn't see for years.
Now the interviewer asks Smith about the transition from that period of rock and roll stardom to "almost complete anonymity." Smith's response, in part:
Because people don't see you or see what you're doing doesn't mean you don't exist. When Robert [Mapplethorpe] and I spent the end of the '60s in Brooklyn [NY] working on our art and poetry, no one knew who we were. Nobody knew our names. But we worked like demons. And no one really cared about Fred and I during the '80s. But our self-concept had to come from the work we were doing, from our communication, not from outside sources.
Necessary words for those of us who are still waiting for that big (or small) break, for those of us whose time seems to have come and gone, for those of us deliberately stepping off the trammeled path to think for a bit, to reconceive.
Necessary words.
