The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart: Stories

by Alice Walker

"These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn as the woman I was to become."

So says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker about her beautiful new book, in which "one of the best American writers today" (The Washington Post) gives us superb stories based on rich truths from her own experience. Imbued with Walker's wise philosophy and understanding of people, the spirit, sex and love, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart begins with a lyrical, autobiographical story of a marriage set in the violent and volatile Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement. Walker goes on to imagine stories that grew out of the life following that marriage—a life, she writes, that was "marked by deep sea-changes and transitions." These provocative stories showcase Walker's hard-won knowledge of love of many kinds and of the relationships that shape our lives, as well as her infectious sense of humor and joy. Filled with wonder at the power of the life force and of the capacity of human beings to move through love and loss and healing to love again, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart is an enriching, passionate book by "a lavishly gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review).

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Feminism, African American, LGBT, African American Literature, Philosophy

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 3, 2000

About the author

Noted American writer Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her stance against racism and sexism in such novels as The Color Purple (1982).

People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

Reviews

[Abbie | ab_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

If you’re looking for a book that covers families, marriage, queer relationships and race with gorgeous style then you know you’ll be onto a winner with Alice Walker!
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This unique little book starts with a semi-autobiographical account of Walker’s marriage to a white Jewish man and its subsequent breakdown during the beginning of the civil rights movement, and then that’s followed by 10 stories, some interconnecting, which further explore the themes that came up in her marriage. I’ve never read anything like it structure-wise, and it was fascinating to watch her plumb different depths and look at ways her marriage might have gone, the what ifs and the what might have happeneds.
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It was heartbreaking and eye-opening, as Walker’s and Leventhal’s marriage was one of the first legal interracial marriages in Mississippi, and the abuse and hostility they received was horrific. I also love how she writes about sexuality, as something fluid and mutable.
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I think I would have rated this one higher had I read it spread out over a month or so. As she’s writing about the same themes, reading them all over the course of two days began to feel a bit repetitive, so I’d recommend reading this one gradually, dipping in and out!

[Yn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very hard book to read. The first 100 pages just broke your heart and left you wondering if you had it in you to read the next 100 pages. The last 100 healed the wounds and left new ones. As expected, a beautifully written book.

[Abby Rosmarin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no doubt that Alice Walker writes beautifully. And I loved some of these short stories. However, there were some that just completely lost my interest. I know there's truth in the fiction, but I can only read about a woman who is with a cheating man and also is in love with another woman so many times.

[Visola · Rating 4 out of 5]

So good. I was telling someone I was reading a collection of memoir/short stories by Alice Walker somewhere between nonfiction and fiction. They responded it would be incredibly hard for them to read this because they couldn't tell what was real. I love that I couldn't tell because it's part of what a broken heart is - the bending of reality to try to return to some state of balance and grace. Navigating through the dark spaces and ugly truths that what was and is no more are intricately connected and will never stop changing the rest of your life. This includes all of the beautiful moments, not just the ugly ones.

Walker breaks the book into a series of sections, sometimes with individual chapters within the sections. Some sections feel like fictionalized memoir barely removed from the reality that was. Others, not so much. Some of the stories feel borrowed and all of them are getting at our connections - both how they build and tear us apart.

To My Young Husband

"Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up wherever we perceive that another human has survived. As human." I paused in reading a memoir/short story about Alice Walker's married life and divorce thinking if I just waited a few minutes I could hold back the tears. "Nowadays, when everywhere you look there is so much tragedy, so much sadness, whenever I am about to hear more of it, I scrutinize the person or persons who are about to speak. I am looking to see if they are still beautiful, regardless of the tale they are about to tell. And if they are still beautiful, before they say anything, I tell them they are. This is because Greatness of Beauty is how I see God. God being the common name given by many people to that which is undeniably unsurpassable, obvious and true." At this point, I had to put the book away so I wouldn't be a blotchy, crying mess in public.

For most of the story, they're married and living in Mississippi - an inter-racial couple with a small daughter during the civil rights movement. A lot of it is flashback trying to remember, mourn and capture all the love that once existed. "And that is why I am thinking of you, and reminding you of a moment in which we, unlikely us, shared a vision and reality of love, that need not be completely lost. If North America survives, it will not look like or be like it is today. One day there will be, created out of all of us lovers, an American race - remember how Jean Toomer, whom we sometimes read to each other, in Mississippi, was already talking about this American race, even in the Thirties? We will simply not let the writers of history claim we did not exist. Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us?"

The flashback sequences are connected to a family therapy session decades after the divorce where the daughter is trying to understand if there was ever love between her parents. Our narrator realizes she's never given herself the needed space to mourn the passing of the marriage/relationship/love that existed and takes time to meditate in this necessary space while sharing it with her daughter. It's obvious the love never vanished entirely, it was just too hurt to be expressive, even after all the years.

Orelia and John

A short about a couple navigating how relationships change over time and what it means to continue loving one another.

There Was a River

Navigating how one decides to leave and how complicated it is to see what the relationship actually was. I think this was a bit too close to home and I'll need to come back to it later.

Big Sister, Little Sister

Two sisters sharing a space as grown-ups and each dealing with all the complicated emotions accumulated over the years between them. Each of them is looking for something and sometimes it's a simple moment that bridges all the gaps from growing together.

Growing Out

This is an arc of developing self-awareness through relationships and family history.

This is How It Happened

"This is how it happened. After many years of being happier than anyone we knew, which worked me, my partner of a dozen years and I broke up. I still loved him, in a deeply familial way, but the moments of palpable deadness occurring with ever greater frequency in our relationship warned me we'd reach the end of our mutual growth. How to end it? How to get away?"

Reading this section, I was struck by the earlier scene where the two of them are standing outside the Brooklyn courthouse having just signed divorce papers and she tries to reach out to her ex-husband, but he's uninterested and only seeks to get away. When she turns to leave, she's so relieved that he's essentially already gone from her life. However, throughout the rest of her life, she's often shocked by how absent he is. I'm not sure the story line is the same, but they could be from the same family because each feels so haunted by the other. The narrator is unnamed and could be the same. It could be shortly after her divorce as she's journeying back to herself.

The next chapter of this section is the story of a young, gay woman struggling to remain connected with her mother as a religious group continues to push the mother to cut all connections with the daughter. Their relationship is complicated, but I made everyone uncomfortable on the bus with my outrageous burst of laughter during the scene where she takes her mother and two other women 60+ years old to see their first porno. They see Deep Throat in the theater and discuss it all the way home.

"Yes, I said. I don't see how people stand to stay married to one person for the whole of their lives.
"That's not what you said when your momma and I got divorced.
"It's not, I said. But I didn't know any better then. You'd been together the entire time I'd known you. "I couldn't imagine my own life without the assurance that the two of you were living in the same house.
"Houses get small, he said.
"I'm hip, I said."

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart

This feels like the actual meditation alluded to in the first section of the book. It's more like the letter Walker wrote to her younger self and younger husband.

"We are not even the only ones not speaking to each other. Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we've cried in each other's arms. We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory "safety" of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.

"And yet, Stranger who perhaps I am never to know, the past doesn't exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.

"Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to make the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.

"I send you my sorrow. And my art.

"In the sure knowledge that our people, the American race, lovers who falter and sometimes fail, are good."


In short, this was the right broken-hearted book for my messy, broken heart. It helped me mend and reminded me that all the struggles continue happening in various degrees and are never completely separate. I'm not sure I actually needed reminding, but the validation that Alice Walker provides is some of the best therapy.

[Erin Sunderland · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...the Universe is not that interested in punishing us. Every move we make is simply part of its reflection. " So this is one of those books. The kind that you immediately want to reread as soon as you are done. And it's a really fast, succulent read. I'm sure everyone says this about Alice Walker but it's as if she can see into my head, my heart and my soul. In general, I have a promiscuous relationship with books and I devour them, moving quickly from one to the next but I want to have a monogamous relationship with this book which of course would be completely counter to how Ms. Alice Walker herself would feel but regardless. This is a book about love and relationships, and the end of both but it's ultimately about acceptance, gratitude and joy.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the Colour Purple so was a little disappointed to read this collection of short stories. There is no doubt that Alice Walker is a spiritual and poetic writer but the rawness of her stories was too uncomfortable for me. I enjoyed the beginning of the book – a memoir of the relationship with her first husband, but the rest of the stories, the ‘fiction’ were too transparently taken from her experiences and I found it all too repetitive and wacky.

[Ananya Ghosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could only read the first two sections before I had to return them to my library, but I loved both of those. Especially the part of John and Orelia. They, as a couple, are everything I want in life and the sheer ability of mine to relate my dreams to their reality stuck with me. I hope to get my hands on the book again so that i can finish and put up a better review. But from what I have read, I loved it.

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy Alice Walker's way of writing. She is able to write about emotions beautifully, and is very sensual. This collection was especially poignant, as it deals with her divorce and her often mixed-up feelings about her marriage and the breakup of her marriage. The other stories in the book are about affairs, mixed up feelings of loving two people at once, and the way the other people in your life react when your prominent relationship breaks apart.
This collection might be more relevant to someone who has actually been married and/or divorced. Since I haven't been, it didn't hit me on such a personal level, although of course I have been in relationships where, when the relationship ended, I didn't feel like I knew that person anymore, and that's one of the main feelings she expresses about her own divorce.
I admire Alice Walker for her ability to write so openly about deeply personal events in her life and to write honestly about emotions. It is clear from her writing that she has actually experienced much of what she writes about and that takes a lot of courage.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart is a collection of short stories written by Walker inspired by her conflicting feelings after divorce. I should have read the context for this book before diving in. I think knowing that it was written in the wake of the end of Walker's marriage would've helped me better understand how the stories fit together. Without that connecting theme, I struggled to stay engaged with the short stories. They were beautifully written but often so short that I couldn't stay invested.


Fav quotes:
"Orelia had been brought up in a family... in which men did not frequently do their best in relation to women, but rather a kind of exaggerated approximation off what their male peers told them was correct." (This one is such a great description of this phenomenon!)

"... the Universe is not that interested in punishing us."

"She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over any years. There was an incomparable richness to it."

[Catriona Littler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really heartwarming and heartbreaking moments in this. Slightly lost momentum towards the end, probably because a few of the stories have quite similar arcs to them. Made me want to reread the color purple.

[Kameela Lateef · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading her books because she is 100 years ahead of her time. In anither life she was my mother an i admired her very much. She was tremendous courage an an insight into the black women that is immeasurable. As i read her books i see what this country has done to black peple an how it leads us to make these strange choices. She walks us through the atmospher of both black man an woman, then lays out the directions that we will end up in which truly shows how were stuck in a box in white America. She is very brilliant an with an incredible insight.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wistful and beautiful vignettes of the lives, loves, and losses of different couples.

[monika · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5

“She thought about how hard was to read the stories she sometimes received at the women’s magazine where she worked because in them white women were talking about their closeness to the black women who had nurtured them. It was a love compelled by forced circumstances and forced familiarity. For how could you compete with the little girl who had everything, could buy everything, including your mother? And had been buying your mother for centuries. You could hate your mother for loving someone for whom she had to work. But how could you, since she worked for your benefit, because of you? The pain was because you felt she loved against her will. Because ‘If you can’t be with the one you love,’ as the song went, ‘love the one you’re with.’”

—

“By working with the white women, you were drawn into relationship with them, and sometimes you genuinely cared. So perhaps the question was: Is not affection or love something pitiful, and degraded, when it is compelled by circumstances beyond your control? And when to choose not to love, or to feel affection, represents a greater danger to the soul than one’s simple inability to do so?”

—

“She finally understood something about blackface. That it could be funny. But not the way white people had done it, to make fun of blacks. It was funny only when it made fun of human gullibility, human frailty and craziness — as blacks had used it among themselves.”

—

“Black women are being murdered in Boston, Massachusetts. White women are being murdered in California. Native American women are being murdered in New Mexico. Hispanic women are being murdered in New York. Chicana women are being murdered in Texas. All of us are being attacked because we are women, and no one really cares about us but us. Let us understand this, and stop expecting the same Patriarchy that is killing us to help save our lives. Refuse the role of victim! Create a new role and identity as fighters for Our Life.”

—

“She thought: How easy it will be for all the attention to focus on black males, their violence, their general unruliness, because that is simply how America responds to its white damsels in distress; even though the majority of rapists, killers and whatnot are white men. And have been, in this country, on this continent, for the last five hundred years.”

—

“She continued her day, thoughts of complicity, assertiveness, guilt, crowding her: to speak out provoked violence; to remain silent encouraged death. It was a dilemma not at all new to people of color, or women.”

—

“My mother broke a self-imposed taboo to speak to me of rape. People who are routinely violated over centuries make curious denials. But I would speak to her of rape, as I spoke to her of everything that mattered.”

—

“Indians are always in my novels because they’re always on my mind. Without their presence the landscape of America seems lonely, speechless. No matter how long we live here, I feel Americans will never know anything about it. In any case, it has been destroyed now beyond knowing.”

—

“... and he claims women shouldn’t write about themselves. He said that white male writers, like Faulkner and Hawthorne and Mark Twain, never wrote about themselves, and that they were masters at it. And I asked him whether this didn’t come out of a tradition of being a writer but needing to keep quiet about the slaving and gunrunning and Indian killing in your family tree. In other words, I said, if white men wrote truthfully about themselves, how could they continue to fool the rest of us?”

—

“You were deliberately conditioned to put yourself last. They used your love for them to make you comply with their every wish. But I watched what they did to you — and decided not to love them more than myself.”

—

“There was the rage, a shut door that seemed to be made of iron; but then way behind it, an unawareness of inequality, only the enjoyment of mutual sweetness. She felt she had been betrayed. No ‘good ole days’ could ever exist for her, once she understood that even her happiest days rested on a foundation of inherited evil.”

—

“These women were invariably timid, sweet, docile, confused, morally lazy, loving and generous. They would not stand up for themselves, however, and she would soon feel the rage — because if they could not stand up for themselves, and they at least had the power of whiteness in a white supremacist society — they would certainly never stand up for her [a black woman], or for real friendship or sisterhood with her.”

—

“He said it was very white. Collecting. Grabbing. Hoarding. Leaving the earth bare. So I started to limit my grabbing. I learned to find things, beautiful things, and not need to take them home.”

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quotes: p. 14 Now, in my 50 K, I know what it is to be deeply exhausted from the struggle to “uplift “the race. To see the tender faces of our children turn stupid with disappointment and ravages of poverty and disgrace. Do you think of the labor as Sisyphus to get his Boulder to the top of the hill as the only fit symbol for a struggle. I am thankful that, when I went to North to college, one of my teachers introduced me to the work of Camus. Sisyphus, he said, transcends the humiliation of his endless task because he just keeps pushing the boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall down again, but pushing it anyway, and forever.
46 After you saw a picture of Daniel and newspaper, actually escaped from prison and was thought to be hiding out in New York City, you were evil for weeks. I was happy he got away. Every day of my life it hurt me to think of him in a cage. But you never understood about prisons in the south. The prisons were just the modern version of the plantation. That is someone like Daniel stole something because he was hungry, he shouldn’t be forced to work cotton for the rest of his life.
83 Women are trained by society not to go after the man they might want, but to wait for him to want them. That’s why there’s such a demand for new and better, more sweet smelling and powerful perfumes. Women have been brainwashed to think they are like flowers and have no feet, and that men or bees. Waiting stationary like that makes them anxious. When a man flies by they grabbed him eagerly. He’s thrown off balance by the sheer awkwardness of it.
116 why descendants of these people were still around, and we’re often on the country roads or on the small street towns streets. There was never a direct eye contact between them and the Irish Scottish descendants, mixed with Indian and African, of darker hue. The Black people had traditionally been so profoundly oppressed by the brutality of the white ones but any connection to them, past or present, with stolidly ignored. In fact, sometimes denied.
130-31 talking about the daughter of the white family where her mother worked: she no longer a member of blaze herself at all, but these women were inevitably unbearably timid, sweet, docile, confused, morally lazy, loving and generous. They would not stand up for themselves, however and she would soon feel the rage because they would not stand up for themselves, and they at least had the power of whiteness in the white supremacist society – they would certainly never stand up for her, or her real friendship or sisterhood with her. Yet, seeking to complete the game with blaze, she picked these women again and again. Whereas her black women friends were chosen primarily for their challenging spirits, however envious, competitive, flighty, war, yes, confused and morally lazy they might be. The ones she really adored with stand toe to toe with the devil himself and yell if you see FU so loudly he cover up his ears.
Her mother helped her escape not by permitting her to return to the louise house, but what was forced on her mother, who could not escape? Little sister had lived out her childhood at a time and a place that permitted her to see both the remnant of slavery and a and a possibility of freedom. But the possibility of liberation was the gift she was unable to give her mother, just as the remnant of slavery, Miss blaze, was the bourbon her mother refused to pass on to her.
143 she’s again how Black people that look to her in the 50s: sweet and hopeful and bright, and clothes and hair that made you laugh. She remembers them that way: innocent.
watching TV Lou Rawls porn she saw now how the show tried to exalt the man parentheses in the person of Lou Rawls parentheses higher than the two main women singers, Gladys Knight and Natalie Cole. And how he seem to be singing from his throat only, we looking off seductively into space, and how the women, very graciously attempted to be less, but could not quite manage it. No matter how low they say it, or how much the script calls for them to look up at him, or how Calmly they tolerated his vacant ““ and seductive gays that just grazed their vivid faces, they could not make themselves less powerful or smaller than he was. Gladys Knight is actually funny trying to hide herself, her talent, her force. Finally she Natalie Cole parentheses who seemed ashamed of her black, 50s looking father, with his thoroughly conquered hair, and showed only the brief glimpses of him on old film clips parentheses stole the show away from him. And did it without ever rising, physically, to his level. They were “ladies “after all, and so the script required then to remain seated the whole time. So that their tryout, gracious to the end, was that more much more amazing.
145 this was a common delusion of Black people, or maybe people in general; that we look less funny than our parents do. However, with our high unemployment, or high infant mortality’s, are uneducated young, our drug infested youth and adults, our pathetic schools, our laughable national leadership, or oppression by greedy and racist people, we were just as funny looking as our parents. We might even be funnier looking because there was so much less hope and it is so much later in the day.
148 I was so proud of you all, she said, walking over to the stereo, putting on the record and cheery handed out. And you were so beautiful, I couldn’t believe it. I was brought up to think all beautiful women have long hair, you know. She laughed. And that you had to wear a clean dresses and delicate little shoes. And you never never know anything about cars beyond how to drive them.
You fell in love with confidence said Jerri, with a shrug. That’s why women like you fall in love with men. If women were as confident as men you wouldn’t give them a second look. Not even a first.
198 about the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and son John John: I wonder how you were feeling about this? Did you gaze, as I did, at the face of the three who died, trying to see if they had, before death, succeeded in finding the secret of life? To live it boldly, fully, without stinginess to the self? Define love and hold onto it until it walks away? To know that today is all we have, and maybe only a fraction of it today? And that living life to the hilt is the best praise of it?
199 we are frightened, heartbroken nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusion of “safety “of skin color, money for the 1950s. We’ve never seen weather like the weather there is today. We’ve never seen violence like the violence we see today. We’ve never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We’ve never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to require. And yet, stranger and perhaps I will never know, the past doesn’t Exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the AutoZone has changed. After natures destroyed, money will remain in edible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorry. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins with the wound is made. Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginnings to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like. I sent you my sorrow. And my art. Ensure knowledge that our people, the American race, lovers who falter and sometimes fail, are good.

[Shannon Whitehead · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read another Alice Walker short story collection, but it didn't grab and shake me like You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories did. The stories just weren't as striking to me and frankly, I was bored through most of it. I liked the stories in the "Big Sister, Little Sister" section the most, though. I still love, love, love Alice Walker but compared to the last short story collections of hers that I read and The Color Purple (which I absolutely loved), this one wasn't my favorite. Still not a bad read and the stories were easier to follow than the ones in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. You could say they were gentler. But maybe that was the problem for me—this collection didn't pack as much of a punch and lacked the some of the depth that I was looking for and appreciate from Alice Walker.

....He understood very well what was making her sick. For the first time in her life she had fallen in love at the same that she had the experience to know it would never work out. The fighter in her hated the necessity of giving up without a trial, but the lover in her feared imminent death.

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[Indrani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am still pondering what to put in this review...

For those unfamiliar with her work (my friends and I are sci-fi/fantasy geeks, just before anyone starts in with "How can you not know..."), Alice Walker writes beautifully. She is lyrical, and real, and emotional. This collection of stories is very personal (by the author's own admission), and it shows.

Some may complain that the material here is too repetitive. To me, the repetition was necessary and symbolic: we all have patterns and cycles that we repeat within our lives and our relationships. Sometimes, it takes this sort of outside examination to see them, to admit to them - and without that recognition, we can easily be trapped in cycles that are unhealthy. This collection is Ms. Walker's recognition and admission of her relationship(s), her possible cycles, and the growth (and stagnation) within them.

I do not know that I would recommend this as a first reading of Walker's work. I've not read some of her more famous works (I'll get the "The Color Purple", I'm sure... just not yet) - I found "By the Light of my Father's Smile" more accessible, perhaps because of it's touch of the magical and spiritual that echoed my familiarity with authors such as Charles deLint. That said, it was an excellent read, and gave me pause for thought about my own relationships, and the patterns within them... which is what it was meant to do, I suppose.

[Aparna Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m very surprised to say that I didn’t like this book at all. I had very high expectations when I started reading it because Alice Walker is a beautiful and thoughtful writer. Even though the first section - her letter to her ex-husband reminiscing about the early days of their interracial marriage - reminded me of the feeling of upliftment I had experienced when I’d read “The Color Purple”, the remaining part of the book felt underwhelming, and frankly, disappointing.

This collection of love stories tries to do what many love stories don’t - ground the idea of the “idealised” love to the reality without romanticising both the ecstasy and pain involved in loving someone. However, what it fails to do is bring forth much originality and scope for uniqueness. We accompany a motley bunch of characters and families throughout the book and witness the coming together of their love followed by its disintegration through their estrangement. But I noticed that most of the stories were repetitive and lacked creativity. It also felt like Walker was checking boxes when it came to representation of different identities and issues surrounding these identities, which I believe is understandable and often necessary, but I had hoped for better execution of these themes. Instead, they feel forced and fairly boring. In fact, I had to skim through some stories because they read juvenile in their linguistic tropes - very surprising from a writer of Walker’s calibre.

[Dani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Walker's discussion of relationships and sexuality, family, race, legacies, anything will be a favorite of mine.

This is a collection of short stories encapsulating many relationships, queerness, love, inspired from her divorce with her husband. They were tender and I really enjoyed them.

Personal favorites from this collection:
The Orelia and John collection (in particular Olive Oil)
There Was A River
Conscious Birth
The Brotherhood of the Saved

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although Alice Walker is a well-admired author, I read only about 60 pages of this book before I gave up. A collection of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical stories, this book was just too bitter and sad for me to want to continue. I don't doubt her ability as an author, it is just that this book isn't for me.

[Linda Joy]

I read this book during a time when I was questioning whether or not I mattered in the lives of some of the people I know. I could easily put some of my story beside this story, which in a way was both healing and validating.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven sensitively written short stories that made me say, "Yes. This is great writing."

[Martin Ramsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book by Nobel Prize winner Alice Walker. Full of wisdom about a whole lot of stuff. Her mixed heritage and living with the legacy of slavery works its way through the different stories. Of herself she writes "... now when I participate in Indian ceremonies I do not feel strange, or a stranger, but exactly who I am, an African-AmerIndian woman with a Native American in her soul. And that I have brought us home."

Elsewhere she writes about two little twelve year old girls, one black, one white, who play together as equals until one day, the white girl's father tells the black girl to call his daughter 'Miss Blaze' and the friendship ends. Walker writes about the little black girl, "Little Sister had lived out her childhood at a time and in a place that permitted her to see both a remnant of slavery and a possibility of freedom. But the possibility of liberation was the gift she was unable to give her mother, just as the remnant of slavery, 'Miss' Blaze, was the burden her mother refused to pass on to her."

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fiction that draws heavily from Walker’s own experiences and thoughts about the reality and history roaring around her in post-Segregation America. Stories center mostly upon Black women reaching middle age and looking at their “now” compared with a “then.” They are usually writers. They are usually married or have been married. They are usually having affairs. More often than not, they live Queer lifestyles. The characters feel close to Walker, but only one or two stories seems to be connected to actual events and people in her life, the main one being “To My Young Husband:” a series of letters written to an ex-husband in an attempt, years after the fact, to make sense of and memorialize a love that was previously lost to time and grief. The title says it best.

Despite involving very similar dynamics between characters, I liked the diversity of settings and events across the runtime of the collection. Alice Walker can place her characters anywhere and they will find something to bounce their reflections off. Again, the title says it best.

[Jason Prodoehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. I liked it. There were phrases, sentences, ideas, that really made the book incredible to me. However, I wasn't sure always whether it was the author talking about herself, or someone else. I suppose it doesn't really matter. Any perspective is interesting to me, no matter whose it is. There are some powerful ideas and experiences in this book, but I didn't love it as I did The Color Purple (which was more of a narrative). If you are particularly interested in race in the US, or inter-racial marriage, or a host of things, you will find something worthwhile in this book.

[Wanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was superb as per usual. The way Walker weaves together words to describe emotions makes me that much more aware of my own emotions b/c she has put into words what I have felt, but didn't know how to express it.

Great content. It broke my heart that her marriage ended too. It's hard to wrap my mind around how so much love between two people dissipates, but it happens all the time and it is heartbreaking every time. Only 4 stars for this book though because some of the stories in the middle lost my interest.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

PopSugar Reading Challenge 2020: "A book by a WOC."

Having never read "The Color Purple," I didn't know Alice Walker's writing style. I found her descriptions wonderfully evocative and visually stirring. Since this book is more a collection of stories that she wrote (partially biographical), I am not sure what is related to her life or not. But it doesn't matter for the overall flow. Bookending the sets with letters to her young husband and to the husband of her youth is a wonderful way to start and end the profoundness which I felt reading these stories.

I highly recommend this.

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up — beautiful writing, honest portraits of relationships complicated by infidelity, sexual identities, racism. did not mind the repetition of these themes due to the autobiographical nature of most of the stories which walker is up front about in the intro (and imo is incredibly powerful and unique). started in the middle in a bookstore w the stories of orelia and john & couldn’t put down, enjoyed reading slightly out of order though the beginning & end of the book complement each other beautifully. “olive oil” maybe my favorite

[Brandon Floyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Walker is so painfully brilliant, and this collection speaks toward love and profound loss in ways that are beyond description. I absolutely believe that Walker sets the blueprint for activist work and self-care, and offers such wonderful advice for balancing both. There's no embarrassment here, there's no shame - there's just the resounding earnestness of opening oneself to intimacy and desire, weathering disappointment and moving forward still.

[Potassium · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Walker is a genius with words. Each sentence is beautifully crafted.

That said, I loved some of these short stories more than others. The first set was my favorite. Heartbreaking and powerful. The middle of the book, while still masterfully written, got a little old. And then the last set of stories picked up again.

[Kristie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories were great (particularly "To My Young Husband"), but I couldn't help feeling I'd read all this from Alice Walker before. A cheating man. A married woman falling in love with another woman. An interracial couple being driven apart. Etc. It was not only repetitive with her other works, but it got repetitive within this collection as well.

As always, though, the writing was absolutely on point.

cohesion: 4 stars
writing: 5 stars
characters: 2 stars
personal enjoyment: 2 stars
final: 3.25 stars