by Mishna Wolff
A memoir of the author's childhood up to about the age of 14. She is the
white daughter of European-white parents, but her father apparently
wanted to be close to black culture, so lived in a black neighborhood,
had black friends, played dominoes, listened to soul music, and had
black girlfriends. At school, Wolff is mocked for being white and
clueless, but later on she scores highly on some aptitude tests and is
moved to a private school with rich, white students, who find her
mannerisms a little strange, Through it all, Wolff must deal with her
father, who comes across in the memoir as a loving but hard-ass loser
who can’t finish projects or hold down a job. When he marries a girl
only ten years older than Mishna, the stepmother demands Mishna get a
job at the age of 14, despite her maintaining a 4.0 at school and being
involved in several extracurriculars.
I picked up this book
because I thought it might have something interesting to say about race
in America, how Wolff was too white for the black kids and too black for
the white kids, but it only very briefly touches on race. Why was her
father so interested in a culture that wasn’t his own? What kinds of
cultural barriers were erected by her living in the neighborhood? These
questions aren't answered or even addressed. Is race a huge factor in
her social standing? Not really, she makes friends in both schools with
no more trouble than most quiet, introspective kids. It is a funny
memoir in parts, but in other parts I had to put it down briefly, the
demands her father and stepmother putting on her so hostile as to edge
on to emotional abuse. This isn't a book about race or culture; it's the
memoir of a girl living in a poor neighborhood, who went to a rich
school. It's told in an episodic manner, with the stories not building
on each other or leading to any real insights. It certainly must also be
at least a little fictionalized, as her lengthy conversations at the
ages of 10-14 can’t be all that accurately recorded years later.
