Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Coffee with a canine: Kim McLarin & Stella

The current featured duo at Coffee with a Canine: Kim McLarin and Stella.

The author, on how Stella joined her family:
We adopted Stella from the City of Boston Animal Shelter. We'd looked a long time, and finally we saw a dog there,, a different dog, we thought would work. But the guy working there pulled me aside and said, "You don't want this dog. Trust me." To get the rest of the story, read my book!...[read on]
About McLarin's new memoir, Divorce Dog: Motherhood, Men and Midlife:
In the spirit of Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and Operating Instructions comes this memoir of a writer’s lifelong attempt to balance the contradictions of her life. With a mix of honesty, insight and humor novelist and journalist Kim McLarin explains that from the day she was shipped off to a New England boarding school from her home in Memphis, she has often found herself with a foot in each of two, contrasting worlds. She has been the southern girl sent north alone at fifteen and the child of welfare who mingled with the rich. She is the proud, and often angry black woman who married a white man and the anti-social, slightly misanthropic journalist. The skeptical and wandering Christian. The cat lover who keeps ending up with dogs. The mother who loves her children but definitely not motherhood.

In this loosely-structured memoir McLarin examines the journey of her life through the prisms of love, race, motherhood, writing and faith, both individually and in varying combinations. How race challenges love. How motherhood challenges and builds faith. How writing redeems race and divorce and everything. Also: dating in mid-life.

Many of these chapters grow out of essays originally published to great attention (and sometimes controversy) in The New York Times and The Root. This book will find a receptive audience among readers already familiar with the writer’s nonfiction work.
Learn more about Divorce Dog at Kim McLarin's website and Facebook page.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Kim McLarin and Stella.

--Marshal Zeringue