Publishers Weekly
01/31/2022
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.)
From the Publisher
Those who know Alice Walker’s body of work know that she inspired a generation of Black women writers who continue to impact America’s literary landscape. And didn’t so many of us read Walker to understand how to survive this place, to fight to become whole, to pull self-love to our fleshy, dark selves? And now, to read Walker’s journals—decades of unfiltered musings showing us a complex person with sorrows, triumphs, flaws, and beauties—feels like witnessing a medicine moment, a griotte’s testimony.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, New York Times bestselling author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
“Alice Walker contains multitudes. She is a truth-telling, word-working, change-conjuring, culture-shifting, revolutionary artist and citizen of the world. These journals are a revelation, a road map, and a gift to us all.” —Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage
Kirkus Reviews
2022-01-18
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.
