Menu
Next in the queue
59
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Margo Jefferson
Publisher:
Pantheon
Date:
April 12, 2022
Margo Jefferson has lived in the thrall of a cast of othersâher parents and maternal grandmother, jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes, and stars. These are the figures who thrill and trouble her, and who have made up her sense of self as a person and as a writer. In her follow-up to Negroland, Jefferson brings these figures to life in a memoir that is also a performance of the elements that make and occupy the mind of one of our foremost critics.
What The Reviewers Say
If Margo Jefferson had gone into another profession — cabinetmaking, let’s say — she’d be the type to draw and redraw plans for a cabinet, build and tinker with the cabinet, stand back to look at the cabinet from every angle, probe the purpose of woodworking...disassemble her own product and start from scratch with alternative tools, creating an object that no longer resembled a cabinet but performed all the functions of one in startling ways.
Rather than using her life’s narrative to structure the book, she organizes her becoming through her models. Who, she asks herself, were those people she secreted away? In whose eyes did she see herself reflected? The collection is unorthodox.
Margo Jefferson’s new memoir is a pleasing reminder that we have not quite seen it all. And Jefferson delivers her surprises in fewer than 200 potent pages.
The vintage and revenge of memory, its random lurch and rough stroke: this is her great theme, Margo Jefferson.
