Brothers (& Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving

In this gutsy memoir, journalist Britt writes engagingly about the men in her life, and how caring for them often robbed her of a sense of self-mission. Growing up in Gary, Ind., in the 1960s as the only daughter in a middle-class African-American family with three boys, Britt characterizes her first memories as “doing things for others,” especially in catering to her hard-to-please autocratic dad and self-absorbed older brothers. Beauty was a girl’s tool for getting boys’ attention, and dealing with her black-girl hair and “big behind” preoccupied her, as well as wanting to preserve her virginity at a time when everyone else seemed to be experimenting with sex. When her middle brother, Darrell, was shot dead by police (who claimed he had charged at them) at age 26 in 1977, Britt, then in graduate school, was convulsed by the thought that she might have done something to help him avoid his fate; she fell into a disastrous early marriage, had two children, and ended up a single mother/working journalist until her second marriage in 1990. Her writing, such as a Metro page column for the Washington Post during the 1990s, was intimately informed by her love of her brother and sense of injustice at his death. Britt writes eloquently of a woman’s sense of anguish and ambiguity in giving herself so completely. (Dec.)