I stayed up three hours past my bedtime the other night reading a memoir that was  published this week: The Black Girl Next Door by Jennifer Baszile. It’s Jennifer’s story of growing up in a white suburb of Los Angeles (she went on to Columbia and then to get her PhD at Princeton and is now the first black female professor of history at Yale). It’s a wonderful book – harrowing and heartbreaking in places but also full of humor and insight.  (I love that the publication of this book comes at one of the most exciting and inspiring times in political history  – the month that  Barack Obama becomes president.) 

Here’s the link to the New York Times review and also a link to Jennifer’s writing blog. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/books/09book.html?emc=eta1

www.heatonthepage.com

I try to read as many memoirs as possible for the courses I teach, but this one was particularly compelling for me – we lived in Jennifer’s neighborhood in Palos Verdes, my daughters grew up there, and I knew her sister Natalie who is also a writer. And once, many years ago, her father and I did a presentation together at Lunada Bay Elementary school.