The novel alternates between the stories of Key, a doula who can see and communicate with the dead, and her son, Colly, who lives alone in the family’s apartment in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, raising himself after Key dies from cancer. Colly inherits his mother’s and grandmother’s connection to the spiritual world, which allows Key to remain a presence in his life, guiding him even after her death. Together they tell the story of their community and how they and their neighbors navigate decades of crumbling public housing infrastructure, violence, and poverty.
The writing, on both a sentence and a structural level, is magical. As I read I felt increasingly unanchored in time. I had flashbacks of the beautiful parts of growing up in New York City, but I was also flooded with visceral memories of what it was like to be part of a workingclass family in the 1990s—our struggle to hold our place in a city that has grown increasingly hostile to the poor. But the ghosts in the novel do not let us despair. While they remind us that Colly’s neighborhood falls on a continuum of Black disenfranchisement in the Americas, the ghosts also illuminate the cultural and spiritual practices that enslaved Africans and their descendants have drawn from and created to retain a sense of community, no matter how many times we’ve been forced to begin anew.
Kiese Laymon describes your book as "so New York—yet so deeply Southern on lower frequencies." I know you received your MFA from the University of Mississippi. Did you go down south as a child, or was this your first time living in the South? What effect did it have on your writing process?
This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
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IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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