![]() ![]() She is white, he is black together they are “the child of immigrants, married to the child of people once enslaved.” Her “us” includes the family of ex-husband Dwayne Sims, her high school sweetheart and father of her daughters. “I wanted,” she writes, “to write about us.” A Californian, she sees herself in the words of Joan Didion’s California essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Her people are working-class women, many times married, mothering their own children and those of others, living among lemon groves and tumbleweeds and Santa Ana winds. Straight, who talked about her book at last weekend’s Twin Cities Book Festival, is author of eight novels. Susan Straight (Courtesy of Felisha Carrasco) ![]() It’s a book with more people in it than an encyclopedia - so many it can be difficult to keep track of everyone - and its universe of people and stories is complex, layered and ultimately ravishing. Susan Straight’s “In the Country of Women” works in the opposite way: addressed to the author’s three daughters, this is a book that spirals outward, gathering and illuminating stories of ancestors, family and community. Some memoirs look deeply inward, examining how the self is formed in the crucible of the world. ![]()
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