Ordinary light
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Tracy K. Smith
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 349
ISBN-13: 9780307962669
Subjects: Poets; Death; Family; Race identity; Mothers; Mothers and daughters; African American women authors; Coming of age; Psychological aspects; Home; Identity (Psychology); African Americans; Biography; Psychology
Description: "A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"--

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving 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. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and 'ecstatic possibility,' and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home"--
Notes: "This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: The Miracle; title: I. My Book House; title: Wild Kingdom; title: Spirits and Demons; title: Kin; title: Leroy; title: A Home in the World; title: II. MGM; title: Little Feats of Daring; title: Total Adventure; title: Book a Big Band; title: A Necessary Rite; title: Humor; title: III. Uninvisible; title: The Night Stalker; title: Hot & Fast; title: Shame; title: Mother; title: Epistolary; title: Positive; title: IV. Kathleen; title: Something Better; title: The Woman at the Well; title: A Strange Thing to Do; title: I, Too; title: Testimony; title: V. Another Dialect of the Soul; title: Something Powerful at Her Side; title: A Strange After; title: Abide; title: Clearances; title: Epilogue: Dear God.