Review by Booklist Review
Legendary author and "womanist" Alice Walker connects her past and present in this revealing and frequently heart-wrenching 50-year collection of journal writings. Beginning in 1965, when she was a college student at Sarah Lawrence, we see Walker evolve from naive idealist to battered civil rights activist, young wife and mother, journeyman writer, novelist, and icon. Walker's voice is confessional, spiritual, and rawly emotional, veering from giddy joy one day to existential despair the next. Her romantic and sexual relationships take up significant space (notably her decades-long affair with author Robert Allen and a later romance with singer Tracy Chapman), but it is the carefully sustained and cultivated friendships with such creative and intellectual figures as Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, and Howard Zinn and her many reflections on her family that provide most of the emotional heft. Walker is frank about her family conflicts and estrangements, yet she simultaneously describes bonds with deep love and appreciation for what each person brought to her life. Reflecting on her at times abusive father and distant mother, she is able to see their behavior in the context of the poverty and racism they endured in Jim Crow Georgia and ultimately celebrates their tenacity and strength. Walker emerges as a passionate, eternally hopeful, deeply rooted person who wears her fame lightly and who has woven her struggles and self-doubt into unforgettable fiction.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Walker's journals add a new dimension to her profoundly influential oeuvre and will be of great interest to her ardent readers.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Over three decades of journal entries from Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker come together in this impressive compendium. Things start off with Walker as a university student, having just moved to Sarah Lawrence University in the Bronx from Spelman College in Atlanta, before chronicling her courtship with and eventual marriage to civil rights lawyer Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal. The entries offer an intimate take on the breakdown of their marriage, which Walker describes as one of boredom ("I can't think now of anything unexpected Mel has said to me in the last year"). Alongside personal struggles come illuminating encounters with other major literary figures: Langston Hughes was Walker's "friend and mentor," Ishmael Reed criticized her writing, and Toni Morrison made her "a little jealous? A little envious? Probably." Walker meticulously documents her own questions and doubts about writing, as well: "Why is it we always feel embarrassed by what we write?" Taken together, the entries offer a moving look at Walker's process and milieu; as editor Boyd poignantly writes in the introduction, the journals are "both a deeply personal journey and an intimate history of our time." Walker's fans are in for a treat. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A self-portrait culled from the Pulitzer Prize winner's journals. From her 65 journals and notebooks deposited at Emory University, unavailable to researchers until 2040, Walker (b. 1944) has selected entries from 1965 to 2000, documenting her rise as one of the most celebrated writers of her time, winner of the 1983 Pulitzer and National Book Award for The Color Purple, among many other awards. Introduced and annotated by critic and biographer Boyd, the volume chronicles Walker's civil rights activism, marriage to a White Jewish lawyer, motherhood, divorce, affairs with men and women, blossoming sexuality, religion, money troubles, real estate ventures, and, not least, her writing career. At 21, a student at Sarah Lawrence, Walker wondered, "What am I really? And what do I want to do with me? Somehow," she mused, "I know I shall never feel settled with myself and life until I have a profession I can love." That profession became poet, novelist, and essayist. In 1968, her first poetry collection appeared, and two years later, a novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. She became a sought-after speaker and teacher--"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," the title essay of her collection of Womanist Prose, was first delivered as a talk. "My God, what do black women writers want?" she was often asked. "We want freedom. Freedom to be ourselves. To write the unwritable. To say the unsayable. To think the unthinkable." Sadly, Walker realized that to be in the public eye meant being vulnerable to attack, smarting under vehement criticism of some fictional portrayals. One story, "Roselily," was removed from a 10th grade standardized test in California, "considered anti-religious by the Coalition for Traditional Values, or some such….This is all so ignorant it's hard to focus on it. Yet it's tiring, too." The well-populated volume features many of Walker's notable friends, including Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, and lovers who brought delight and, sometimes, despair. Readers will look forward to the planned second volume. An intimate glimpse into an important writer's life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
