Thanks for the Memoirs Book Club

Thanks for the Memoirs Book Club will focus on memoirs from authors representing a variety of backgrounds and lived experiences. We will meet on the 2nd Thursday at 10am, every other month, starting in February.

This month we're reading The color of water: a Black man's tribute to his white mother by James McBride.Discussions will be facilitated by Mary Sussman, who previously led Shakespeare and Company (2003-2005), dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare; and League Café, dedicated to books about racial equity (2018-2023).

From the bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird: The modern classic that spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list and that Oprah.com calls one of the best memoirs of a generation. 

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. "Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.