Far away from close to home A Black millennial woman in progress : essays

Emmy-winning actress, writer, director, and producer Kelly delivers an intimate and perceptive memoir-in-essays that reflects her state of mind and experiences as a Black millennial woman in the U.S. After a successful childhood acting career, Vanessa attended Florida State University, organized the Student Coalition for Justice, led campaigns for the Trayvon Martin Foundation, and was active on numerous political campaigns. She reflects on how the murders of Trayvon Martin and other young Black males shaped her feelings about her brother's safety and her son's welfare. She provides a firsthand account of her son's upbringing in presumed post-racial America while she was also handling complicated family dynamics and developing her voice within academic and professional environments. She voices raw and usually unspoken truths about how Black women confront love, marriage, and sexual experiences. Kelly also examines what "home" means to her and questions her interconnectedness with her majority-Black community in the Crenshaw district versus the segregation and gentrification of other Los Angeles neighborhoods. Kelly's memoir will help readers interested in African American culture understand how Black women thrive in America.

"Where was home?" asks Emmy-winning actor and television writer Kelly in her searching debut. Seven essays capture her life as a Black woman living in various Los Angeles neighborhoods: "Stop" sees the author riding the bus to work in order to "experience the city," which reminds her of a time in her life when her car was impounded and she couldn't afford to get it out. "Sybrina, Gina, and Me" shows Kelly's work in community organization after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and in "Miracle of Black Love," Kelly sees "a story in every square inch" of her home and reflects on her divorce. The concept of "home" runs throughout: Los Angeles, for example, is Kelly's "forever home," and she writes of gentrification and the city's homeless population, which people "learn to see through." Laced with acerbic humor­--she describes a professor's voice as "resting bitch face of the larynx"--the pieces shed light on the value of community, the intense pressure on a successful Black woman to keep her family together, and the importance of feeling at home. Full of heartfelt insight, this is a powerful collection. (May)

The smell is the first thing that hit me. It wasn't the smell of exhaust or rubber or whatever other material is used on a Los Angeles city bus. It was distinct. A stench we somehow all know but cannot identify how we know it. Like blood or death. The smell was human. Unbathed. Urinated. Downtrodden. Somewhere on that bus, a human person reeked of both living and slowly dying. Not the long-day-of-work smell. Or the just-leaving-the-gym smell. But the stench of days on a street. No running water. Perhaps no water to drink. I had grown accustomed to this smell from walking east on Sunset Boulevard. Past the Walk of Fame on Vine Street. Past the huge billboards and building long advertisements for multi-million-dollar films and too expensive coffee. Past $5,000 a month condos and cafes with pet parking. Past all of that. But not too far past. Just a few blocks east, to the corner of Gower where the same stench that was on that bus fills the air, thick, in the same way a nose is assaulted by more pleasant odors in a city: bacon wrapped hot dogs or new air fresheners in an Uber. This was the smell of a person looking for a home. It didn't take me long to find the source. Instinctively, I walked all the way to the back of the bus to sit down. I could hear my childhood teachers scolding me in my head: "We fought too long and too hard for any Black person to choose the back of the bus." I heard their arguments and I respected their position, but the convenience of not being bumped every time someone had to get off the bus gave me reason to believe that, instead, my ancestors had fought for my choice to sit where I wanted, and today I was choosing the back. I sauntered through the bus, nodding at the bus driver, quietly hoping for an easy, no-human-interaction ride into Hollywood. My ride to work, which was normally thirty to forty minutes, would now take over an hour on public transportation. I would have to creep through neighborhoods and side streets that I would love to live in but could not afford, as gentrification prices of middle-class Los Angeles communities of color rose higher and higher. Of course, without gentrification, I would have hated to live there, and that was a reality I struggled with daily. I would also be crossing through neighborhoods not yet gentrified but well on their way. Ones that I would be happy to be in the back for, to avoid the seemingly unsavory (whatever that meant), the people who could tell I don't normally take the bus, the people Los Angeles allows you to forget about in your tiny enclave of security. excerpted from the essay "Stop" (c) Copyright Vanessa Baden Kelly, from Far Away from Close to Home Excerpted from Home Is the Mouth of a Shark: Essays by Vanessa Baden Kelly All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.