Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life

Borrowing from Alice Walker’s definition of womanish­—which includes “outrageous, audacious, courageous, or willful” behavior—these 13 essays by journalist, novelist, and professor McLarin (Jump at the Sun) join the personal and the political. McLarin’s topics range broadly from the ravages of depression (“To demonize my depression [would be] to diminish the last 30-odd years of my life”) to the stress of parenting while black (“an exhausting job”), from the occasional value of revenge (“The truth is I am not ashamed of my two targeted, nonviolent, singular and specific acts of revenge”) to the perils of online dating (“loving a sociopath does not have to be all gloom and doom!”). By turns current (discussing the shadow of the Michael Brown killing and the “unassailable, meteorite-hard sense of self” of Barack Obama) and historically minded (recalling Ida B. Wells-Barnett or the figure of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god), the essays are strengthened by relevant scholarly studies and statistical data readably scattered within. McLarin offers a frank vision of growing up black, unmediated by simplistic notions of a postracial America. Undeterred by having “been labeled angry, aloof, and even uppity,” McLarin is boldly argumentative, provocative, and challenging in these excellent essays. [em](Jan.) [/em]