Patricia Foster - Böcker

Deeply personal essays probing the lingering legacies of the southern social divideIn Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, Patricia Foster presents a double portrait of place and family, a book of deeply personal essays that interrogate the legacy of racial tensions in the South, the constriction of caste and gender, and the ways race, class, and white privilege are entwined in her family story. After interviewing girls at Booker T. Washington High School in Tuskegee, Alabama, visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and exploring Africatown in Plateau, Alabama, Patricia Foster was moved to reflect on the racial scars and crossroads in her southern past as well as to reckon with the intimate places of her own wounding and grief.The story of place, she discovers, emerges not only from family histories and cultural traditions but also from wrestling with a culture’s irreconcilable ideas: the hard push to determine what matters. What matters to her are the shadow stories beneath our mythologies, the complicated and radiant narratives that must be excavated and reckoned with, stories that have no neat or binary resolution, stories full of luminous moments and riveting facts, and stories where the secrets hide. Written in the Sky presents the best of nonfiction storytelling: searingly honest portraits, dramatic encounters, and lyrical narratives that will interest teachers and students as well as social justice advocates, policymakers, and readers compelled by stories of awakening and the white-hot beauty of language.

Writing about oneself, says Patricia Foster, "engages in truth but depends on the imagination, on the life just beneath the skin, a life that's impressionistic and fragile." These eleven closely linked personal essays are at once an absorbing chronicle of a life fully undertaken and a model for anyone who has contemplated self-investigation through autobiographical writing.The book's three sections each convey a stage of Foster's journey—still ongoing—toward new levels of insight and maturity. "Inside the Girls' Room" takes us back to Foster's life in the rural South from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Here she reveals the mixed messages and stereotypes of southern womanhood by which she was raised-and from which she fled. With adulthood, Foster moves to "Inside the Writing Room," a place dotted with discoveries about autobiography as a path to creative expression and inner coherence. Finally, at the place in her life Foster calls "Inside My Skin," autobiography helps her to explore and to claim her cultural identity. Returning to her native South, she holds a writing workshop for a group composed mostly of middle-aged black women, visits a beloved maid from her childhood, and returns to old haunts as a witness to her concerns about race and class.This gathering of lyrical essays explores the intelligent, intuitive heart of a woman struggling to claim both her identity and her place in the world.

In A Marriage in Startled Air, Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband’s rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the journey of recovery—and discovery—between two artists in a relatively happy marriage leads to difficult conversations about family, memory, identity, and aging. Within this unburdening, Patricia and David discover a new map of intimacy: Once the illusion of normalcy is broken, what emerges is something sweeter and deeper, as if the broken thing becomes, ironically, the healing thing.

Amanda and Jit Soldier grow up in the secluded beauty of Soldier Creek, Alabama. After their parents’ marriage falls apart, the girls and their mother stay in Soldier Creek. Until Amanda wins a scholarship, leaving Jit alone with the mother who has long been needy toward Amanda but emotionally distant toward Jit. In Girl from Soldier Creek , the sisters must learn how to disentangle themselves from their home, their dysfunctional family, and ultimately, from each other to discover who they will become.