Her entry begins:Right now I'm reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I plucked it out of my bookshelf one night last week, when I was hungry for a novel and realized I hadn't been to the library or the bookstore recently. (I do own an iPad and have downloaded a few ebooks from the library, but it's not the same for me.) I've been trying to read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and also to finish The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Both of these are brilliant, necessary books but one of my problems with nonfiction is that once I know the central argument -- mass incarceration serves as a deliberate form of social control along the same line as first slavery and later Jim Crow, and The Great Migration, respectively -- it's hard for me to muscle through the work itself. That's probably a personal failing, but it's also why I love fiction. I read fiction not for the message but for...[read on]About 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 theLearn more about Divorce Dog at Kim McLarin's website and Facebook page.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.
Read--Coffee with a Canine: Kim McLarin and Stella.
Writers Read: Kim McLarin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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