About this item
One of NPRs Best Books of the Year"Straights memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the womens stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading." - San Francisco ChronicleIn the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight - and eventually her three daughters - heard for decades the stories of Dwaynes female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straights mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susans family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward - from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan - those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, "The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.""Certain books give off the sense that you wont want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straights new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned-together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment." --Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Susan Straight was born in Riverside, California, where she still lives with her family. Her memoir, In the Country of Women (Catapult, 2020) , was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and CodeSwitch, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and a Finalist for the Clara Johnson Prize for Women's Literature. Her novels Highwire Moon and I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots were recently reissued by Counterpoint. Other novels include A Million Nightingales, Take One Candle, and Between Heaven and Here. She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Magazine Award; she received the Edgar for Best Mystery Story, the O Henry Prize, and the Lannan Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, The Believer, Reader's Digest, Family Circle and others.Her instagram is @susan.straight. Her website is www.SusanStraight.com.
