I'm Down

March 23, 2009
Humorist and former model Wolff details her childhood growing up in an all-black Seattle neighborhood with a white father who wanted to be black in this amusing memoir. Wolff never quite fit in with the neighborhood kids, despite her father’s urgings that she make friends with the “sisters” on the block. Her father was raised in a similar neighborhood and—after a brief stint as a hippie in Vermont—returned to Seattle and settled into life as a self-proclaimed black man. Wolff and her younger, more outgoing sister, Anora, are taught to embrace all things black, just like their father and his string of black girlfriends. Just as Wolff finds her footing in the local elementary school (after having mastered the art of “capping”: think “yo mama” jokes), her mother, recently divorced from her father and living as a Buddhist, decides to enroll Wolff in the Individual Progress Program, a school for gifted children. Once again, Wolff finds herself the outcast among the wealthy white kids who own horses and take lavish vacations. While Wolff is adept at balancing humorous memories with more poignant moments of a daughter trying to earn her father’s admiration, the result is more a series of vignettes than a cohesive memoir.

April 15, 2009
A humorist and former model recalls growing up gifted and white in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood.

In the early 1970s, Wolff and her parents, all Caucasian, moved back to her father's childhood neighborhood, Rainier Valley in south Seattle. The neighborhood had changed from white to black, and her father decided that the family should be black too."He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol," writes the author,"telling jokes like Redd Fox and giving advice like Jesse Jackson." Wolff's mother soon tired of the project and divorced her father. At age seven or eight, Wolff says, she was terrible at acting black, and she became a source of constant irritation and disappointment to her father. She could not dance, sing or even jump rope, and she displayed weakness in a tough neighborhood. Just as she discovered she was good at something black—rapid-fire insults along the lines of"Your mama's so fat…" or"You're so ugly…"—her mother transferred her to a school for gifted children (all of them white and rich). So started Wolff's perilous journey of self-identity. The blackness of her neighborhood only made her feel out of place at school, and the whiteness of her school only alienated her from her father and the black woman he married, to the point where she moved out to live with her mother. By age 12 she was a mess, suffering from insomnia, migraines and a deep anxiety that she would always be poor and never have"a lucrative anesthesia practice like all my friends." Over time, Wolff found some balance. Even her father, in a lovingly told final episode, gave her what she most wanted—his acceptance.

Deftly and hilariously delineates the American drama of race and class for one little girl.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
Adult/High School-In a memoir that is frequently hilarious, occasionally terrifying, and ultimately bittersweet, Wolff forces readers to consider whether racial identity is the result of nature, derived through nurture, or constructed and reconstructed throughout life. The author was born to white parents and raised into early adolescence mostly by her father, a man who worked harder to remake his own and his children's identities as black than he did at earning a living. From early childhood she tried hard to sort through evidence of her own sense of self and belonging: rougher kids in their working-class black Seattle neighborhood rejected her while adoring her younger (equally white) sister; other black kids accepted her as an equal or pitied her confusion; her father's second wife (black) rejected her cruelly; and her mother was willing to take her in but not to confront her former husband's careless child rearing. When her mother enrolled her in a public school program for intellectually gifted children, Wolff had to accommodate her worldview to take into account her classmates' relative wealth and mindless racism. Father and daughter eventually found a bridge through sports, but this rapprochement was made possible as much by the author's maturing emotional health as by her father's realization that he risked losing her. Wolff writes fluidly and offers moments of great insight through story rather than through explanation, making it easy for readers to engage with the child's questions and growing frustrations. An excellent choice for discussion in ethnic identity curricula, but absorbing reading, too."Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2009
I am white, Wolff writes in this episodically amusing memoir of an adolescence spent with a divorced (white) father, who truly believed he was a black man. Or wished he were, at least. Accordingly, Wolff grew up in a black neighborhood, went to black churches, played on all-black basketball teams, and struggled desperately to be as down as her cool father. This began to change whentests having revealed her to be giftedshe found herself across town in a new school full of smart kids who were richer than God. Meanwhile, her seriously narcissistic father has married a 23-year-old black woman who regards her new stepdaughter as a racist. As a result, Wolff finds herself a misfit at school and at home, and her story becomes a struggle for self-identity. Some of this is funny, some of it is sad, some of it is predictable. How much of it is true is open to question, since the obligatory authors note acknowledges certain composites, re-creations, and changes. Nevertheless, Wolffs take on race relations is heartfelt and refreshingly offbeat.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)