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Book

1 of 1 Copy Available

  • CENTRAL: Second Floor
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Ordinary light : a memoir

Call Number

  • 921 S6627 (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Physical Description

349 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"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.

Contents

  • Prologue: The Miracle
  • I. My Book House
  • Wild Kingdom
  • Spirits and Demons
  • Kin
  • Leroy
  • A Home in the World
  • II. MGM
  • Little Feats of Daring
  • Total Adventure
  • Book a Big Band
  • A Necessary Rite
  • Humor
  • III. Uninvisible
  • The Night Stalker
  • Hot & Fast
  • Shame
  • Mother
  • Epistolary
  • Positive
  • IV. Kathleen
  • Something Better
  • The Woman at the Well
  • A Strange Thing to Do
  • I, Too
  • Testimony
  • V. Another Dialect of the Soul
  • Something Powerful at Her Side
  • A Strange After
  • Abide
  • Clearances
  • Epilogue: Dear God.

Subjects

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