What do you think?
Rate this book
Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex
Bringing together fourteen African-American women, Marita Golden has compiled saucy and spicy essays that serve as an exploration into the contemporary black female psyche. Ranging in style from Audre Lorde's classic polemic on eroticism to Miriam DeCosta Willis's deeply moving essay on her husband's last years, "every single one of these essays is terrific." -- The Washington Post
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
7 people are currently reading
258 people want to read
About the author
Marita Golden
30 books159 followersMarita Golden (born April 28, 1950) is an award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, distinguished teacher of writing and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
(from Wikipedia)
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 11, 2014
You drive through a small town where you encounter a makeshift literary festival. You see a book edited by an author whose name sounds familiar because of her other work Migrations of the Heart, which you haven't had a chance to read yet, so you purchase this book instead, along with a few other books (because they're sold at such a good discount it feels like being in a candy store). You get home and the book sits on your shelf for a year. You're looking for a nonfiction read when you come across the book and you're like uh-huh, this is it. And then you open it and you find yourself Lol'ing and gasping throughout.
This book of essays is a prodigious feat for the personal essay genre. Though I didn't care too much for the one or two academic-like essays in the collection, I found that the personal essays were laced with stylish voice and persona, the storytelling intoxicating. Usually when I read a collection of essays or stories, I mark my favorites and flip through for a count. In this collection, the essays I loved were too many. That says a lot.
One minor pet peeve though was the subtitle. I'm not sure why the subtitle included sex because although sex was an undercurrent, the essays are revelations about much broader truths.
In this collection fifteen award-winning authors (some professors) deliberate women, love, marriage, race, relationships, and trauma.
Some of my favorites:
Marilyn: Kesho Yvonne Scott talked about growing up during the 1950s, "marriage in the fifties was considered the natural progression in the rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood...It was also a way to legitimize pregnancy," and how books saved her, "and lo and behold I learn that black women are writing books. And that's the first time I hear about Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Zora Neale Hurston--and I see women telling stories, using my Daddy's language and from our point of view."
Letting Go With Love: This essay about losing a husband to cancer, by Miriam Decosta-Willis, was heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. "Mine was a childhood shrouded with images of death: uncles, dark and gaunt, diminished by disease; aunts, silent and somber, in mourning black; women, coming and going, in whispers; bats and dead birds littering Charleston streets after a raging hurricane."
The Act Behind The Word: A woman relives a brutal childhood rape (thank goodness the perpetrators were caught) after having hidden it in her mind for over twenty years.
Wounded in the House of a Friend: A lyric essay and a blues meditative rendering about love and lust.
Tough Boyz and Trouble: "I was too young to know that in many ways you become who you love, but one day I would wake up and find that instead of simply sleeping with trouble, I was engulfed by it.
This book of essays is a prodigious feat for the personal essay genre. Though I didn't care too much for the one or two academic-like essays in the collection, I found that the personal essays were laced with stylish voice and persona, the storytelling intoxicating. Usually when I read a collection of essays or stories, I mark my favorites and flip through for a count. In this collection, the essays I loved were too many. That says a lot.
One minor pet peeve though was the subtitle. I'm not sure why the subtitle included sex because although sex was an undercurrent, the essays are revelations about much broader truths.
In this collection fifteen award-winning authors (some professors) deliberate women, love, marriage, race, relationships, and trauma.
Some of my favorites:
Marilyn: Kesho Yvonne Scott talked about growing up during the 1950s, "marriage in the fifties was considered the natural progression in the rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood...It was also a way to legitimize pregnancy," and how books saved her, "and lo and behold I learn that black women are writing books. And that's the first time I hear about Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Zora Neale Hurston--and I see women telling stories, using my Daddy's language and from our point of view."
Letting Go With Love: This essay about losing a husband to cancer, by Miriam Decosta-Willis, was heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. "Mine was a childhood shrouded with images of death: uncles, dark and gaunt, diminished by disease; aunts, silent and somber, in mourning black; women, coming and going, in whispers; bats and dead birds littering Charleston streets after a raging hurricane."
The Act Behind The Word: A woman relives a brutal childhood rape (thank goodness the perpetrators were caught) after having hidden it in her mind for over twenty years.
Wounded in the House of a Friend: A lyric essay and a blues meditative rendering about love and lust.
Tough Boyz and Trouble: "I was too young to know that in many ways you become who you love, but one day I would wake up and find that instead of simply sleeping with trouble, I was engulfed by it.
February 13, 2021
A beautiful collection of essays for and about Black women, their trials, successes, relationships, and everything in-between. Each story focused on a different facet of what it meant to be a Black woman in the 20th century so I give 5 stars for the breadth of experiences represented. I bonded with each of the authors on different levels which is often difficult to achieve through just essays. I recommend for anyone in search of friends (as many of the women grew to feel like friends I'd have at different points in my life) or in need of a mirror for their own experiences - or both.
August 17, 2012
the essays were, for the most part, considerably tamer than the title would have led me to believe.
December 1, 2024
A beautiful anthology that takes so many different angles to explore the topics of love, men and sex. Really enjoyed reading each piece. It’s a truly varied collection that paints the vastness of experience
July 16, 2019
Meh. Some essays were interesting...the rest were just...meh to me.
February 23, 2012
Having grown up in a predominately black country/society, the perspective of black America is one of which I am almost completely ignorant. February is Black History Month and so lately I have been thinking more about this part of my heritage. I began reading The Future of the Race by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West at the beginning of the year; I haven’t finished it yet but up to where I had reached was very thought provoking.
Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues was such a good book. The book comprised of essays by Black women writers on the topics of love, sex and men. Technically I am a black woman but reading this book it hits home more strongly that the Black American culture is vastly different from the Black culture that I live in. Many of the issues faced and dealt with in the book are somewhat universal, the loss of loved one, finding the right guy, and so on.
But some of the issues are specifically race based and limited to the United States. Why Black women can’t find a good black man? The topic of prison wives, Black women with incarcerated husbands, is not so much of a race issue, if an issue at all in Jamaica simply because we are a Black country.
In Jamaica, race is not an overt issue. Few people are exposed to outright racism and so I think we grow up not having an appreciation for the struggles that others have to go through even today, this applies especially to my generation. We all know about our heroes and their fight for freedom from slavery and Jamaica’s independence, and of course more recently Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement but all of this is more of an abstract knowledge of history, rather than something applicable to our lives right now.
Books like these help to make people conscious that the fight for racial equality isn’t quite finished. Someone I had a discussion with the other day pointed out that in the café we were at, the customers were predominantly of a lighter complexion than the servers and as long as that is the case and all the people working behind the counter are of a darker hue then equality has not been achieved.
Rather than being a book filled with the writing and rants of bitter Black women on love, sex and men, the book was predominantly a celebration of the resilience of these women, who have faced things like rape, racial prejudice, family rejection and other tribulations and they have emerged stronger for it all. Books like these make me a little prouder of my heritage and myself; and make me more aware of those that have come before me and paved the way to allow me to be where I am today.
Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues was such a good book. The book comprised of essays by Black women writers on the topics of love, sex and men. Technically I am a black woman but reading this book it hits home more strongly that the Black American culture is vastly different from the Black culture that I live in. Many of the issues faced and dealt with in the book are somewhat universal, the loss of loved one, finding the right guy, and so on.
But some of the issues are specifically race based and limited to the United States. Why Black women can’t find a good black man? The topic of prison wives, Black women with incarcerated husbands, is not so much of a race issue, if an issue at all in Jamaica simply because we are a Black country.
In Jamaica, race is not an overt issue. Few people are exposed to outright racism and so I think we grow up not having an appreciation for the struggles that others have to go through even today, this applies especially to my generation. We all know about our heroes and their fight for freedom from slavery and Jamaica’s independence, and of course more recently Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement but all of this is more of an abstract knowledge of history, rather than something applicable to our lives right now.
Books like these help to make people conscious that the fight for racial equality isn’t quite finished. Someone I had a discussion with the other day pointed out that in the café we were at, the customers were predominantly of a lighter complexion than the servers and as long as that is the case and all the people working behind the counter are of a darker hue then equality has not been achieved.
Rather than being a book filled with the writing and rants of bitter Black women on love, sex and men, the book was predominantly a celebration of the resilience of these women, who have faced things like rape, racial prejudice, family rejection and other tribulations and they have emerged stronger for it all. Books like these make me a little prouder of my heritage and myself; and make me more aware of those that have come before me and paved the way to allow me to be where I am today.
Read
December 20, 2013814.5408 W6689 1993
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews