👋 Hello readers!👋

It's been a while since we've read a memoir, but the entire time I was listening to Rebecca Carroll's Surviving the White Gaze I was thinking about how much I wanted to talk about it — so I'm sharing it with you for this month, and I hope you feel the same!

Carroll describes growing up in rural New Hampshire as the sole Black person, not only in her family (she was adopted by white parents at birth) but also in her small town. When she meets her birth mother, also a white woman, the vague tensions of her youth are pushed into the light as she’s forced to reckon with her alienation as a child, her complicated relationship with her parents, and her understanding of her racial identity. It's a poignant, intimate, and revelatory story. Check out an excerpt about Rebecca, at 6 years old, starting ballet lessons taught by the captivating Mrs. Rowland — the first Black person she has ever met.

Over in the Facebook group, we'll be posting discussion threads throughout the month, following this schedule:

March 1-10: Prologue–Chapter 18
March 11-20: Chapter 19-37
March 21-31: Chapter 38-Epilogue

And of course we have our giveaway! Simon & Schuster is giving away 10 copies with signed bookplates sent separately, and Libro.fm is offering 5 free audiobook downloads. I can't recommend the audiobook, read by Carroll, highly enough!

Want a shot at one of these great prizes? Respond to this email by Thursday, March 4, 6 p.m. ET, and tell us about your favorite memoir — and be sure to include your (US-only, sorry!) address. Winners will be selected randomly. Good luck!

Happy reading,

Arianna

📚 Behind the Book 📚

We asked Rebecca to tell us a bit about how Surviving the White Gaze came together. Here's what she had to say.

Credit: BuzzFeed News; Laura Fuchs, Simon & Schuster

I had always been a devout — perhaps obsessive — journaler. A pro letter-writer. A dedicated correspondent. And an ambitious essay writer. I wrote my first essay (all of 10 words, give or take) when I was 6 years old, and prior to that, a play about a woman who lived alone and dusted her bookshelves religiously, but with great care, a tender protectiveness toward ensuring the unpolluted living conditions of her many beloved books. In my adult life, as a journalist, I wrote profiles and op-eds and reported pieces. I published five interview-based books, for which I wrote intros and outros, sometimes personal interludes. But when I first sat down two years ago to write my memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, it felt as though I’d never written a single word before in my life.

Memoir writing, come to find out, is not just about stringing journal entries together, or leapfrogging from one personal anecdote to the next. It’s a craft, like a novel or a short story or a screenplay. It needs a beginning, middle, and end — it requires a narrative arc (which, I should add, my play about the woman who dusted her books did not have). I had to learn how to write a memoir, and it was challenging, humbling, and ultimately, a real joy. As most good writing is in revision, I taught myself to peel back the layers of artifice, to hone in only on the experiences throughout my life that spoke directly to surviving the white gaze, and most importantly, I taught myself to listen for the tenor of my voice and mine alone. I did not have to sound like Toni Morrison (as I had long aspired), or anyone else whose writing I admired — I needed only to sound like myself.

And here’s the thing, I discovered that my writing voice, the voice that could sustain 300-plus pages of narrative storytelling, sounded in equal parts like that girl who wrote her first essay at 6 years old, the budding playwright who cared so intently for her books, the young journalist who wrote profiles and op-eds, and the interviewer hungry for answers in search of community and Blackness — all of this, but with the polish of wisdom.