“I think he got parvo. I think he picked it up out the dirt.” …”Maybe he just sick, Skeet.” “What if it’s in the dirt? What if the rest of them get infected?” —Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward It took some chutzpah for Willie Morris, at the age of roughly 33, to believe that his […]
It’s hard to say, even 370 pages later, what the yellow house means to Sarah Broom. As a substantial structure about which to tell a story of a place, it’s not much to look at—a shotgun house in New Orleans East, ultimately ravaged by Katrina and razed to the ground. For most of the second […]
Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir, Heavy, made many best book lists last year. I got to it this year, partly because I understood that it was about Laymon’s struggles with his weight. It’s about a lot more than that. And Laymon’s struggles as a young, African-American man growing up in Mississippi are different than mine. With sparkling […]
“America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.” —Ta-Nehasi Coates, Between the World and Me I confess that I picked up Heavy, Kiese Laymon’s staggering memoir about growing up bright and black in Mississippi, with more than a little curiosity about the obesity […]
“At the nadir of my confidence as a writer, I despaired of ever finishing Lit. I considered selling my apartment to give the advance money back. Then a Jesuit pal asked me, quite simply, What would you write if you weren’t afraid? I honestly didn’t know at first. But I knew finding the answer would […]
