The books that saved the creator of the Well-Read Black Girl book club

No one is a better candidate for a memoir book than Glory Edim, the creator of Well-Read Black Girl, a book club with nearly half a million followers on Instagram. Fans of her club, which highlights black women writers, will likely want to know more about the authors who shaped this self-taught literary titan. But “Put Me Together: A Memoir of the Books That Saved Me” offers much more: a dramatic life story full of twists and turns and intertwined leitmotifs that might seem ingeniously designed if it weren’t all true.

Edim grew up in Arlington, Virginia, the daughter of an architect and a teacher, both Nigerian immigrants. Her mother read to her when she was a baby, and Edim read to her younger brother, Maurice, after her parents divorced when she was 8, her father mysteriously disappeared, and her mother took two jobs to support herself. to the needs of the family. Together, they enjoyed “Corduroy,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Charlotte’s Web,” and they disappeared into the stacks of the Arlington Public Library, calling softly for “brother” and “sister” to join. find them when the time comes. leave.

After her mother remarried and another sibling arrived, Edim became a virtually preteen parent, changing diapers, picking up her brothers from daycare and school, feeding them and putting them to bed. . But her experience was not shared by anyone she knew – nor reflected in the many books she read.

And his life became more and more difficult. Her emotionally corrosive stepfather hammered at her self-esteem, telling Edim that she was doomed to be “knocked up at 15,” even though, she writes, “I was a church-going teenager whose most great rebellion was to try to steal a little more time to read.”

When Edim, then 11, saw footage of Maya Angelou reading at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, it was a revelation.

“Imagine being a pubescent child suffering under the eyes of a stepfather who personally strives to ensure that I am completely ashamed of my own body and its burgeoning sexuality,” she writes. “And then imagine…the shock and thrill” of reading Angelou, “which brought me back to the person I had once been.” She memorized poems such as “Still I Rise” as if she were “taking notes on my impending womanhood.” Thanks to Angelou, she found Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison.

Edim met the poet again in high school, when her beloved white Advanced Placement English teacher (she had no black teachers) assigned her “Catcher in the Rye”, which she hated, as if it was a “sacred offering” and accused Angelou, her favorite writer, of bad grammar. But the teacher listened patiently as he explained why this was a misreading of Angelou’s vernacular style, even helping her formulate her argument against him. He thus helped cultivate the critical thinking that led Edim to see the broader flaws in the program – even if he didn’t. “I sometimes still find myself arguing with Mr. Burns in my head,” she wrote.

As a teenager, Edim became a single parent not only to her brothers but also to her mother, whose divorce from her second husband plunged her into a debilitating depression. “Zombie dragging”, his mother practically stopped getting up, going out and, above all, talking – for five years. Edim had no adults to turn to; the only family friend she contacted said her mother was “possessed.”

A snapshot of Edim’s life as an undergraduate at Howard University during this era should make any professor think twice before judging students who fall asleep in class. She got up at 5 a.m. to bathe and feed her mother and chat with Maurice about who would pick up their younger brother from school and do the shopping. Then, she writes, “I had my own classes to take, a tutoring session to lead, the daily challenge of pretending to be an average, happy, functioning senior in college, not a desperate babysitter and exhausted, a sister and a daughter who could barely keep the lights on.

She also worried for her brothers’ safety following the Rodney King beating and other incidents of police brutality. Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” gave him “the vocabulary to describe that helpless impulse to try to protect the people you love from a system you can’t control.”

As Edim struggled to make sense of both the mother she had and the mother she lost, she read “Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde and a switch flipped. “My own mother taught me how to survive from a young age through her own example,” Lorde writes. “His silences also taught me isolation, fury, distrust, self-rejection and sadness.” Survival, the writer adds, is the greatest gift, and “sometimes, for black mothers, it is the only gift possible.”

With Lorde’s help, Edim realized that she was now truly motherless – coincidentally, while she was on a plane to Nigeria to reconnect with her father and become again, after more than a decade apart , “someone’s child once again”. » Ultimately, both of his parents came back into his life through a series of almost miraculous events that are best enjoyed without spoilers.

Edim’s first book, “Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves”, is an anthology of writings by black authors answering the question “When did you first see yourself in literature?” “Bring me together” is his own response.

You might read it purely for its spectacular story arc, but don’t. Read it to learn how libraries can be a crucial refuge for children whose home lives are unmanageable. Read it to see how white-dominated high school curricula can erase and invalidate black students. Read it because many of the books that nurtured, guided, and empowered Edim are the ones that MAGA Republicans want banned.

And read it because, as Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your sorrow are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. »

Margot Mifflin is a professor at the City University of New York and author, most recently, of “Searching for Miss America: The 100-year quest for a contest to define womanhood.