8/18/2023 0 Comments Kate tuttle bookz![]() ![]() ![]() She died the year before Straight married her grandson. “Changes the DNA.” Daisy grew to mother four daughters and traveled to California to make the family’s home in Riverside. “Violence like that enters the blood,” Straight writes. There was Daisy, born in Mississippi, whose mother was run down by a car driven by white men - before the car came, Daisy’s mother threw her 5-year-old daughter out of harm’s way. “There was inside her a core of fury and independence and self-preservation, the genetic heritage of survival,” Straight writes as she maps Fine’s journey from Tennessee to Texas. They include women like Fine, born during Reconstruction, orphaned at 6, taken (but not taken in) by a white family, growing up dirt poor and bearing three children as a teenager. Straight recalls a graduate school classmate sneeringly asking her in a workshop, “Why do you keep writing about all these working-class people?” Writing these families’ stories, in the context of American history, politics and literary taste, is itself a radical act.Īmong the book’s great characters are Dwayne’s foremothers. She is white, he is black together they are “the child of immigrants, married to the child of people once enslaved.” Her “us” includes the family of ex-husband Dwayne Sims, her high school sweetheart and father of her daughters. “I wanted,” she writes, “to write about us.” A Californian, she sees herself in the words of Joan Didion’s California essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Her people are working-class women, many times married, mothering their own children and those of others, living among lemon groves and tumbleweeds and Santa Ana winds. Straight, who talked about her book at last weekend’s Twin Cities Book Festival, is author of eight novels. You may have heard of the Elf on the Shelf, or you. Susan Straight (Courtesy of Felisha Carrasco) An enumeration of everything thats wrong with the holiday toy. It’s a book with more people in it than an encyclopedia - so many it can be difficult to keep track of everyone - and its universe of people and stories is complex, layered and ultimately ravishing. Susan Straight’s “In the Country of Women” works in the opposite way: addressed to the author’s three daughters, this is a book that spirals outward, gathering and illuminating stories of ancestors, family and community. Some memoirs look deeply inward, examining how the self is formed in the crucible of the world. ![]()
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