This was such a powerful book, it made me think so much as i went through the pages. ( )

In this "biomythography" Lorde explores the various women who impacted her life, starting with her mother in her childhood, her friend Gennie, and as she grows into young adulthood, the various lovers she had over the years.

This seems to be one of those books that straddle fiction and nonfiction, though it reads like a memoir and includes the emotional truths Lorde experiences as a Black lesbian woman, starting with growing up in Harlem and moving through her young adulthood. The first half of the book dealing with her childhood, her mother, and her school friends connected most with me. She kind of lost me when she started talking about her relationships, but I could appreciate the way they each helped her become more herself. It was sometimes harrowing to read - she has an unsafe abortion, and the FBI just casually show up at her door. Lorde explains how, despite being lesbian, she still experienced racism in the gay community and had to deal with not fitting into the molds that even the "gay girls" as she calls them had for relationship roles. Being a Black gay woman in the 1940s and 50s was no easy thing, yet Lorde also experiences joy and love. A powerful read that will stick with me for a long time. ( )

Sometimes I found the descriptions of everything around her beautiful, sometimes tedious. Sometimes i appreciated her honesty and frank descriptions of her feelings for other women, sometimes I found them voyeuristic and out of the scope of my understanding.

But ultimately it made me cry a little and when she talks about how much she's looked down upon for being black even past being lesbian it's heartbreaking, even if sometimes it gets obscured by a litany of names I can't connect and descriptions of scenes I can't imagine. It's still beautiful. ( )

1982. A beautiful memoir of Lorde’s childhood in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s, and her early adulthood and first loves. Her parents were West Indian from Grenada, and very strict. Her high school love commited suicide after having possibly been sexually abused by her father. She worked in a factory in Stamford, Ct. for a while running unsafe xray equipment. She went to Mexico in the early 50s and had a lover there, an older white woman who was an alcoholic. Back in New York she went to the lesbian bars in Greenich Village and lived with a lover for a couple of years. She describes the difficulty of finding other lesbians in those days, and the struggle of being one of the few black lesbians in that community. The beauty in in the writing and the strength of living through a lot of trauma. ( )

I didn’t think of this book as a memoir when I read it in grad school. I was immersing myself in the work of Lorde for a possible chapter in my dissertation. Unfortunately, Lorde passed away of cancer while I was in grad school. She was 58 years old. This chapter never got finished, although my dissertation did.

Lorde wanted readers to think of this book–as a biomythography. In it she writes about her origins, as a Caribbean child growing up lesbian in Harlem, and she writes about some of the women she loved in her life. She tried to create a new literary genre, by combining a personal mythology with biographical events, but it reads to me as an experimental memoir.

Does that word experimental annoy you or turn you off? It does me. But this is a beautiful book.

In its play with language and boundaries, the book is representative of feminist texts of the early 90s. You won’t notice that so much as you will fall into Lorde’s world and find out what it was like to be an African-American lesbian poet of her time period. That’s what I learned from Lorde’s book. ( )