Twelve linked essays move among three generations of Black women in Bernard's family — her grandmother's Mississippi, her mother's civil-rights-era South, and Bernard's own life as a scholar, wife in an interracial marriage, and adoptive mother in Vermont. The first essay recounts the day in 1994 when a stranger stabbed her in a New Haven coffeehouse, a wound she uses to open questions of race, the body, and storytelling itself. The book won the Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose.
Author: Emily Bernard · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2019
