Things I Should Have Told My Daughter

February 10, 2014
A sampling of playwright and novelist Cleage’s (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day) journal entries over 20 years, from 1970 to 1990, as a young journalist, feminist, Civil Rights activist, wife, and mother delineates a long, difficult journey toward self-realization. A student at Spellman College in Atlanta, involved in SNCC meetings and civil rights organizations with her politician husband-to-be. Michael Lomax, Cleage embarked on her journal as race relations were splitting apart the country. Yearning to be a writer, chafing at the constraints of having to ply her way as a journalist, and resentful of the chauvinistic attitudes of men (reading The Feminist Mystique she recognized that, in terms of hiding real issues, “Men have done almost as good a job as white folks”), Cleage tried overall to be true to the ideals she envisioned for herself in her youth. She worked for the election of Maynard Jackson, the first African-American mayor of Atlanta; then got pregnant by the beginning of 1974, prompting many months of fretting about motherhood. Between Maynard’s and her husband’s campaigns, Cleage began to write in earnest in the late 1970s, often working as an itinerant screenwriter, recording her literary findings, and grappling constantly with how to be a sexual being in a committed relationship—thorny questions that led her to leave her marriage and embark on a series of affairs with married men in the 1980s. By turns frank, and wide-eyed, Cleage’s entries reflect a fulsome, tender spirit, hungry for authentic experience, eager for love.

February 1, 2014
Cleage (Just Wanna Testify, 2011, etc.) reprints journal entries chronicling her tumultuous life in the 1970s and '80s. "Do us all a favor," said her now-grown daughter. "Burn them up and be done with it." But the author wants to share the decades in which she discovered her vocation as a playwright, poet and novelist while remaining deeply engaged in political activism, as a speechwriter for the first black mayor of Atlanta, and as a feminist grappling with marriage, motherhood, divorce and subsequent sexual freedom. Entries from the early 1970s in particular plunge us back into a time when a substantial number of young Americans, including African-Americans such as Cleage, honestly believed either a revolution or a fascist takeover was imminent. The great virtue of this seemingly unedited journal is that it gives a vivid sense of a real life's varied nature, with an entry about how women can serve the revolution followed by the author's comments on the film Women in Love. (She's an avid moviegoer, fond of French New Wave and Hollywood alike, and her musical enthusiasms run from Bruce Springsteen to Peabo Bryson.) The drawback is that there are absolutely no notes in the text to do anything as basic as identify "Daddy" (Cleage's father, prominent civil rights activist Bishop Albert Cleage) or the last name of her first husband, Michael (Lomax). Cleage apparently thinks everybody knows all about her public life, and she comes across as self-involved, even within the context of a journal. (The solipsism is leavened by some poignant letters from her dying mother and a couple of tough professional memos to Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson.) She's also ruthlessly candid: about her professional ambitions; her jealousy of more successful writers, especially if they're also female and black; her unabashed indulgence in marijuana and alcohol; and her multiple love affairs, often with married men. Readers won't always like her, but they should know her very well after 300 pages of unmediated effusions. A warts-and-all self-portrait rendered in juicy, robust prose.

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February 1, 2014

Writing is what Cleage, an acclaimed poet (We Don't Need No Music), essayist (Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons To Riot), novelist (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day), and award-winning playwright (Flyin' West) does. Here, her journals are the source of a revealing, intimate memoir. With over 50 years of notebooks stashed in cardboard boxes and a steamer trunk, Cleage contemplates their value. Her daughter suggests burning the journals, but Cleage resists; this historical record allows her to remember details and understand how she survived and succeeded. She shares entries from 1970 to 1988 in this volume describing her "mad flight toward financial independence, sexual liberation, creative fulfillment and free womanhood." VERDICT Cleage's observations explode with joy, anxiety, anger, and, of course, honesty; her style is breezy and casual but the content is complex. Her fans will embrace this work, and all readers interested in women's memoirs, especially those focused on the struggle against racism and sexism, will be moved by this title. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/13.]--Kathryn Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN

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