Review by Booklist Review
As a novel, movie, and stage musical, Alice Walker's The Color Purple holds a unique place in American culture, held up as a triumph of female Black truth-telling and excoriated as a racist assault on Black manhood. Like many Black women, Tillet views reading the book as a rite of passage, and its author Alice Walker as a contemporary goddess. A pilgrimage to Walker's home leads to Tillet learning more about the autobiographical elements in the story, while for sexual-assault survivors, especially Black ones, the story of Celie's abuse at the hands of Mister is darkly familiar, and Celie's resilience and eventual triumph provides catharsis. It is this element of the tale that Tillet sensitively and powerfully explores. For women like Tillet, herself a survivor of sexual violence, Celie's story is a path to healing, but many Black men see the book as a confirmation of stereotypes of Black male savagery. This gender divide was reflected in the movie's fate at the Academy Awards; nominated for 11, it won none. Walker's novel was far ahead of its time, and it is still ahead in ours. Tillet comes to a deeper understanding of the novel, Walker, and herself in this revelatory and memorable blend of biography, autobiography, and insightful homage to a literary icon.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tillet (Sites of Slavery), New York Times critic-at-large, surveys nearly 40 years of cultural grappling in this insightful account of Alice Walker's 1982 novel The Color Purple. The novel became the first work by a Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Tillet recounts the novel's history, covering the controversy it stirred up when published, notably for its "use of a black dialect and its celebration of lesbianism." Walker later came under fire, as well, for allowing the movie adaptation to be put in white hands. (Steven Spielberg directed it.) In addition to the history, Tillet mixes in her own experiences: "The novel's main black women characters--Celie, Shug, and Sofia--have endured and emerged as guides that have imprinted themselves on me to help me heal," she writes of returning to the novel after being sexually assaulted, struggling with an eating disorder, and contemplating suicide. Along the way, Tillet interviews Oprah Winfrey, who made her big-screen debut in the adaptation, and theater producer Scott Sanders, who persuaded Waters "that he, as a white, gay man from the Gulf Coast of Florida, was the right person to produce The Color Purple on Broadway." Tillet's passionate insights successfully imbue a classic novel with modern relevance. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In this moving narrative, Tillet (English, Rutgers-Newark; Sites of Slavery) explores how The Color Purple (1982) shaped and continues to shape readers. For the author, this involved traveling to Northern California to speak with Walker about her National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning book and interviewing figures such as Gloria Steinem, who wrote the foreword to this work. Walker tells of basing the character of Celie on her grandmother along with the difficulties of critics misinterpreting the intent of her words. What also emerges is a personal recounting of how Tillet discovered The Color Purple, notably, how she resonated with Celie, as a teenager recovering from sexual assault, while Shug embodied who she wanted to become. This is the strength of the work, as is Tillet reminding readers of the criticism The Color Purple received upon publication as well as ongoing challenges from libraries because of its portrayals of lesbianism and sexual assault. Later, Tillet considers the lasting impact of the 1985 film and 2005 musical based on the book, including Walker's thoughts on both. VERDICT Tillet writes a necessary account of how Walker's centering the lives of Black women has transformed literature. Accessibly written, this book will engage both longtime fans and those new to Walker's writing.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A close look at the genesis, impact, and transformation of a beloved novel. Melding memoir, biography, and cultural criticism, Tillet, a professor, activist, and scholar of African American studies, uses Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, as a mirror for portraying Black women's experiences in American life over nearly 40 years. In conversations with Tillet, Walker spoke candidly about her early years, literary influences, and the challenges she faced in getting published; after sending an excerpt to Essence magazine, for example, she received a terse reply: "Black people don't talk like that." Although the novel was awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, it incited considerable controversy, not only for Walker's use of Black dialect, but also "its celebration of lesbianism. The harshest criticism," Tillet discovered, "came from other writers, mainly black men who accused Walker of reproducing racist stereotypes of them as hyperviolent rapists." It was precisely Walker's portrayal of violence to which Tillet, twice a victim of sexual assault, responded, and through her research, she found many others--including Oprah Winfrey--"who came across the book at such vulnerable points in their lives that the book became a talisman, with every subsequent return to it a way of marking time and healing wounds." Tillet draws deftly on published and archival sources as well as interviews, including talks with Oprah, who made her screen debut in Steven Spielberg's film of the novel, which received 11 Oscar nominations; and Scott Sanders, who brought the novel to Broadway as a musical, where it was nominated for multiple Tony awards. Because of the novel's groundbreaking themes of sexual assault, same-sex desire, and the linking of sexism, racism, and classism, Walker, Tillet asserts, became "the face of black feminism," an accolade with which Gloria Steinem, in an appreciative foreword, concurs. An enriching study for the novel's many devoted readers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
