First published 2022
Margo Jefferson builds what she terms "a temperamental autobiography" from pieces of varying lengths and moods. She weaves together arts criticism with personal history, letting key moments from her life dictate the book's flow. Jazz records from the 1950s speak as intimately as family voices. Ballet dancers merge with Olympic athletes to show what female bodies might become. Literary figures cross paths in unexpected ways as W.E.B. DuBois borrows from George Eliot's work for his own famous passages about living behind the veil. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner emerge as alternate selves while Harriet Beecher Stowe's character Topsy appears in contemporary art by Kara Walker and music by Cécile McLorin Salvant. Writers, singers, movie characters, friends, and family members speak through Jefferson's prose as both inspiration and conversation partners. The fragments address family dynamics, racial identity, and social class, but aesthetic desire and complicated feelings about beauty drive the narrative. Jefferson creates an unconventional stage for storytelling that brings together surprising voices and unexpected connections.
Genres: art, african-american, autobiography, biography-memoir, criticism, 21st-century, family-drama, cultural-studies
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unconventional-narrative
Period: 1950s, Contemporary
Paperback · Granta Books