Hello and welcome to Spinster's Library.
I'm Claudia and today I'm reviewing
Gather Together in my Name by Maya
Angelou.
This is the second part of Maya Angelou's
autobiographical series and this was
published in 1985.
It is quite a short book and only covers
a couple of years in Maya Angelou's life, mostly
between the ages of about 17 and about
19 during the years following World War II.
I generally speaking struggle with
memoirs, I don't find that they hold my attention
very easily,
but this was without a doubt the best
memoir I have ever read. I even prefer
this one to the
first Maya Angelou memoir, which is
called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
and is generally accepted to be one of
the most spectacular examples of the
genre. I really enjoyed I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings, but this one really blew me
away.
It is a book that's full of contrasts.
There is so much humour in it, there is so
much lightness in it,
but there is a lot of darkness in it as
well. There's so much
heartbreak and often the humour and the
heartbreak are just sentences apart.
This book really takes you on a rollercoaster.
In it we follow a teenage Maya
as she tries to really find her feet
as an adult in California.
She has a young son but she doesn't really see him as
his own person and one of the things
that she has to learn
in this part of her life is to
accept him as a real human being.
But really she is
still a teenager trying to figure out
what she wants to do
in her life, while working a series of
jobs from a fry cook to a show dancer
to almost accidentally becoming a pimp.
But just as fragmented as her work life
is also her personal life and especially
her romantic life. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see how
this young woman is so
trusting in men that clearly all want to
take advantage of her in one way or another,
and there's something shocking about
reading that
the woman who would one day become the extraordinary
role model that was Maya Angelou started her adulthood as such a
naive and innocent and trustworthy
individual.
Every time a new guy enters the scene in
this book, there is the sense of hope
that this is the one, this is the one man
who's going to treat her
with respect and dignity and honesty,
and then inevitably the disappointment
follows. And yet you don't get a sense of weakness from
this young Maya Angelou, you get
a sense of resilience, of
a woman who walked through her life
always giving her best
and taking life's letdowns in her stride.
What I really loved about how Maya's
personal disappointments were handled in this book, is that she
is not trying to teach you a lesson
through her mistakes.
Often in memoirs I find that the author
tries too hard
to twist those mistakes or early
disappointments
as kind of a learning moment. Like there's all these
valuable life lessons they learned in
their youth and they're now
trying to communicate those to you, the
reader. Almost like it's
fate that a memoir author had to go
through some difficulty
so that they can now be a mentor to the
reader of their memoir.
Maya Angelou doesn't do that. She goes
through the highs and lows of her early
life and treats her former self with kindness
and without any pretensions that the
lows that she went through
are part of some bigger plan. In this
book she's drifting from place to place,
job to job, man to man, and there is this dark
undercurrent of the sort of post-war
depression
underneath all of it. Drugs play a really big part
in the book and drug addiction affects
in one way or another, some more directly
some less, almost all of the people that
we meet in this memoir. This is of course
set pre-civil rights era and there is a real sense of darkness
that overlays all of the personal problems that Maya
is going through.
Before I finish this review, let me
briefly talk about the style. This book is an absolute
masterclass of evocative writing
done to perfection. I've never been to
San Francisco, never mind to San Francisco in the 1940's
and the author clearly
knows that. She is clearly writing these
memoirs for people who haven't lived
in that time and place, But instead of
getting lost in endless descriptions, like
many other memoir authors, Maya Angelou manages to create
scenery in just a few short sentences.
And she applies
this very compacted approach to language
not just to descriptions of places, but
also of people, of situations, of feelings,
and that is how she managed to write a
book that is so
rich in just over 200 pages.
Tiny little book, you can really see the
craft of the poet shining through in this prose. This book
is so dense, so compact, so perfectly polished
that every sentence packs a punch. And that is
why I gave Gather Together in my Name by
Maya Angelou five stars, and I should mention that
this is only the third
ever non-fiction book that I have loved
so much. I would really very highly
recommend this to
any reader. Although I would also
recommend that you read
the first part in the series, which is I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
before you get to this one, just so you have
more of an understanding of where Maya
Angelou came from,
what her childhood was like and where
she was when we pick up in the story of
her life on the first page.
As for me, I will definitely read
the rest of this series. There are seven
books in total
that take us through Maya Angelou's life,
and I really can't wait to see where she
takes me next.
So let me know in the comments if you've
read this absolutely stunning example of
a memoir
and if you felt the same way about it as
I did.
I did not expect to be so
emotionally sucked into a memoir, because
as I've said all of my previous
experiences with memoirs, even with memoirs
that many people have loved,
I have always been a little bit distanced.
I never quite felt the author as much as I did with
this book, not even
in the first installment of this series.
So I already know this is going to be
one of my reading highlights of 2020.
Let me know your opinion in the comments below.
Thank you for watching, bye.
