Ordinary Light: A memoir

Author: Smith, Tracy K.

Brand: Knopf

Color: Black

Edition: First Edition

Features:

• Knopf Publishing Group

Binding: hardcover

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 368

Release Date: 31-03-2015

Part Number: 9780307962669

Details: Product Description
National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.
Review
“Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a talent evident in every line of this crystalline memoir. Hers is not the dysfunctional family story we've grown accustomed to reading; in fact, Smith recalls her family of seven as ‘steady, steadfast, happy, and whole.’ In loving detail, she recalls both the happiness and the complex questions of her childhood. Religion is a force to be reckoned with again and again [and] questions about race are also ever-present . . . Smith’s honest, unflinching book offers an inspiring model for seeking the light in an ‘ordinary’ life: ask the tough questions, look in the hidden corners, 
allow yourself to understand, and never stop searching for faith.” —Dawn Raffel,
O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“This forceful memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet relates her experience of growing up in a bookish family, and the dawning of her poetic vocation. It begins and ends with the death of her deeply pious mother. The hurts (and caresses) of life are rendered indelibly.” —
The New Yorker
“Transcendent . . . deceptively simple, deeply affecting. Most of the time,
Ordinary Light seems to be a coming-of-age story about a middle-class black girl with a relatively idyllic life. If this were all that her memoir were, Smith would’ve succeeded in publishing something revolutionary: a book about a happy, financially solvent, high-achieving black family—more specifically, the story of the healthy, nurturing bond between a black mother and daughter. Too few books that fit this description exist. Black family memoir more often explores overcoming poverty, bad parenting, substance abuse, and trauma related to racism. Stories about black mothers and daughters are even scarcer. . . .Though I don’t get the sense that Smith was concerned about the ways in which her memoir might serve to ‘normalize’ the black parenting experience, it succeeds at doing so—for those who would need the existence of healthy black families confirmed—just by focusing on her parents’ presence and encouragement. But the memoir is most powerful when it returns to the subject of her mother’s illness and Smith’s slow-dawning realization that she will not recover . . . It seems that, in writing about her [mother], she’s combing through the minutia of her childhood, adolescence, and early womanhoo

EAN: 9780307962669

Package Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches

Languages: English