Title: Before HerAuthor: Jacqueline Woodson
Series: The One #1
First Published: July 30, 2019
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Pages: 19
Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction, Short Stories
Format: Ebook
Source: Prime Reading
Rating:
Synopsis:
In this transportive memoir, the National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming traces the relationships in her past that would eventually deliver her to the love of a lifetime.
Before Jacqueline Woodson met Juliet, before her own self-realization, there were decades of friends, lovers, and family who defined the woman she’d become. In this haunting story of memory and identity, Jacqueline shares the profound impact they had on bending the path of her life; how they informed the dreams of her future; and how each one—some lost, all loved—would bring her to Juliet, her one and only.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
The cute painted cover did not prepare me for the heaviness of the content in this bite-sized book and I was honestly stunned. Before Her covers a few vignettes about Jacqueline Woodson’s life and experiences as a queer woman of color in the art scene, particularly during the 1980’s. The events are not linear and are more of a stream of consciousness, talking about different things that led up to Woodson eventually meeting her life partner, Juliet.
This little mini-memoir was a surprisingly powerful sampler for Woodson’s work, it was my first experience with her writing and it makes me want to run out and read her books. Her writing was so gorgeous I found myself highlighting so many passages despite the small page count.
Quote
“The stories I told myself were too often of being left rather than leaving. Being left is easier, elicits more sympathy, gives reason for tears.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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