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    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
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    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
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    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
    Ebook393 pages6 hours

    In the Country of Women: A Memoir

    By Susan Straight

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    About this ebook

  • A memoir about race—women who are African-descended, French and Swiss, indigenous and immigrant, whose fathers are a mystery, and how mixed-race people continue to shape this nation, as they always have.
  • In the Country of Women follows six generations of women in Susan Straight's family, including Fine, daughter of an enslaved woman who died just after the Civil War; Daisy, whose mother was murdered in Mississippi; Ruby, Susan’s paternal grandmother, whose life ended in the Colorado Rockies before Susan was born; her own mother, Gabrielle, and her immigration from the Swiss Alps to Canada to California; Susan's life and those of her three daughters, all descendants of fierce, resilient women.
  • The book is also a memoir of migration and memory and murder, mothers and daughters and sisters, an odyssey of heroic journeys west, always west, made by women, toward the homes they fashioned in California. It’s also about family, tenacity, and love.
  • Straight offers thoughtful and exhaustively researched stories and mini-biographies of five generations of women, and paints a portrait (one part intimate revisionist history, one part Homeric feminist epic) of a nation forged and families sustained through the decisions, struggles, and movements of its women: “They survived passages that would have made a lot of men quit. Sometimes the men did quit. Sometimes the women quit the men—to stay alive.”
  • Susan Straight can write, and her evocative sentences and storytelling beg to be read aloud. She brings alive a California that readers have not encountered in Joan Didion or Eve Babitz. Straight’s California is working-class, immigrant-rich, Native and Mexican and Japanese American, and often held together by the single family unit where mothers work and fathers have left long ago. But like Didion, Straight values letters and literature, and both helped her to survive and sustain empathy.
  • In the Country of Women is a welcome portrait of interracial, working-class America; while often unseen, the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population has identified as mixed race, and Susan Straight offers a moving and accessible story of her family, mapping her mixed-race daughters' ancestry through the lives of the women who came before them.
  • Yet this is no Pollyanna tale or postracial fantasy; the families in this memoir are not immune to racism, sexual violence, or socioeconomic struggles. But in spite of these hurdles, and in an attempt to overcome them, Straight's relatives champion a fierce love focused on the survival and care of kin and community, which is a universal concern unbound by race or class.
  • In the Country of Women is an unconventional love letter to Straight's three mixed-race daughters, the “future of America”; she maps the love (and loss) from which they came.
  • James Baldwin was Susan Straight’s teacher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he was the one who urged her to write about her life and her husband’s life.
  • In The Country of Women is also the story of how books can change lives, change socioeconomic status, change and engender empathy.

    Bookseller Praise for In The Country of Women

  • "How did you get here? How many people traveled how many miles, to meet and marry and have the children that then moved about to meet and marry and have children, and on and on until you were born? In the Country of Women is an incredible, informative, and moving memoir that takes us on several journeys. Going back and forth, author Susan Straight takes the reader between her own story—meeting and falling in love with her husband and having children with him—and the epic journeys and lifetimes of all of the amazing and resilient women on both sides of the family. Gripping and thought provoking, Susan Straight discusses race, and sex, and love and loss, leaving you thinking hard about all these things long after you have put the boo
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781948226233
    Author

    Susan Straight

    Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com. 

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    Reviews for In the Country of Women

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    • 5/5
      I'd read Straight's books I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen And Licked Out All The Pots (1992) and Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights (1994) and was always curious about her comfort and familiarity with African American families (she was clearly Caucasian in the book flap). My "aha" came from the cover of her memoir, with its three adorable mixed race girls. In 1979, Straight married Dwayne, her high school boyfriend, and they became the junction not only of their daughters, but for two incredible families with disparate trunks, limbs, branches, and leaves. The best of times were the frequent driveway gatherings of Dwayne's large clan, with the mandatory inclusion of each woman's unique side dish, and Straight's visits with Dwayne and the girls to the Heidi-like mountain village in Switzerland where her mother was born. But this is mostly a story of Riverside, CA, on the wrong side of LA but with welcoming room for every imaginable nationality. The author is frank and honest about her divorce and about her neglectful father, and about her gratitude for the acceptance and love of Dwayne's family, due primarily to Straight's desire for inclusion and their own love for her daughters. Missing and sorely missed: family trees.Quotes: "Some Americans have tried to make slavery a single chapter in the nation's history, a finite number of years that ceases influence at the end of the Civil War. Tell this to the thousands of black women and men killed in carefully planned acts of retribution or for casual sport." "I was trying to explain to someone how we grew up. I was like, wait - what's below humble?"
    • 2/5
      I liked the first section of this book, when the author tells the story of all of her forebears, but I got bored when I hit the second part and she started talking about her family and relationship. She seems to think she's a big deal because she's a blond married to a black guy. Yawn.
    • 5/5
      I saw Susan Straight on a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books, shortly before this book was released. It has been on my radar ever since, though I have not read any of her other books. I found it on Hoopla (accidentally), and immediately checked it out.This book is a love letter to her 3 adult daughters. It is history, biography, memoir, autobiography, family history. In particular she looks at all of the women who have led to their existing--her own Swiss-immigrant mother, who ran from a marriage to a local pig farmer arranged by her own stepmother, eager to get her out of the house. Her mother's mother, who died young. That stepmother, who did not like her stepchildren, but whose own children and nieces/nephews are happy to host their families and do consider them all family. Her high-school-sweetheart ex-husband's mother Alberta, a black woman from the south, and her many sisters and aunts and cousins. The events that led all of these women to Riverside, California, where they all ended up living in a 6-block area that Straight still lives in today. The men are here too, but often they were difficult or died young or chose a second wife over their own children. Or they themselves fled a stepparent when young, starting over with no family nearby. And many families had large families with more girls than boys, so those girls stuck together always, raising each others' children or providing shelter as needed.Straight tells a fabulous story. Food, place, family. Fear, racial discrimination, police actions, friends that become family. Visiting her step-grandmother's family in Switzerland. Growing up poor, living in Riverside when a/c wasn't a thing, working in fields or factories. Loving to read and write and learn. It's all here, and it is all wonderful.