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“A beautiful portrait of a full life that has been buoyed by an expansive and ever-growing love for words and for language.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”—Toni Morrison, Beloved
For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back.
Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older she discovered authors and ideas that she wasn’t being taught about in class. Reading wherever and whenever she could, be it in her dorm room or when traveling by subway or plane, she found the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni, through children’s poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou, through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison, while attending Morrison’s alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde, on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others taught her how to value herself by helping her to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, and to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their stories.
Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 29, 2024 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780525619802
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780525619802
- File size: 1777 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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August 9, 2024
Edim, the founder of the Well-Read Black Girl book club, writes a memoir in books, stressing how authors such as Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, as well as places of reading, from the public library to her dorm room, to airplane flights, have shaped and powered her life. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Edim, author and founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a popular literary community dedicated to Black women, writes about and explores the books that inspired, shaped, and changed her in this heartfelt and absorbing memoir. To say Edim is an avid reader is an understatement. As she writes in her ardent prologue, "Books have been my ladder, my stepping-stones, my therapist, my teacher, my medicine, my parents, my religion, my lover, my fool, my instructional manual for life." She centers each chapter around specific books and ties them to distinct times in her life, beginning with growing up with her Nigerian immigrant parents in Virginia as well as through their subsequent divorce and her father's abandonment. She identifies the books by Black authors that helped her cope with an unstable home life, f ind herself, question her faith, learn and grow through her college years at Howard, find true community in New York City through WellRead Black Girl, and become a mother who passes her love for reading on to her son. The openness in Edim's prose invites the reader into a true understanding of what these books mean to her and how they helped her through both dark and happy times. Readers who enjoy coming-of-age memoirs will find much to love.COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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October 15, 2024
Professional bibliophile pays tribute to the books that made her. Edim rose to prominence as the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, an influential and far-reaching literary organization. InGather Me, she reflects on a lifetime of devoted reading. From childhood on, whatever was going on in Edim's life, books were a constant presence in her survival and self-development. But while each chapter in the memoir centers on the books that were most pivotal in a given period of her life, Gather Me is less a book about books than a book about a life in which books were always in the background. Edim writes more about her home life and personal struggles than she does about the books that are important to her. It is the power of reading, more than the power of specific books, that is Edim's real interest. The details vary, but any reader can relate to the sentiment she expresses in recurring passages such as: "I built a personal library that reassured me that my own happiness was possible. Despite my mother's illness and all that surrounded it. For me, reading was reparative. Toni Morrison compelled me to hone in on my vision. Maya Angelou urged me to take more risks. Alice Walker drove me to build something outside of myself. Somehow their intricate stories and astute observations provided me with an unbreakable foundation." Occasionally Edim gets carried away by the strength of her personal connection to the writers she loves and misses her own point. She refers to books by Morrison, Walker, and others as "monumental narratives written exclusively by and for Black women," an assessment that would, by implication, impoverish literature for every reader, including many of Edim's own.Gather Me is a book for anyone who has ever loved books. A love story that attests to the power of literature.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 19, 2024
In this endearing debut ode to literary figures ranging from bell hooks to the Berenstain Bears, Edim, founder of the Well Read Black Girl network, eloquently explores the transformative power of literature in her life. Encouraged by her Nigerian immigrant mother to read voraciously, Edim spent her Virginia childhood making up stories with her younger brother. When her parents’ marriage faltered and her father returned to Nigeria in the early 1990s, Edim burrowed even deeper into the comforts of her bookshelf, finding particular solace in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As she catalogs her struggles through high school, her studies at Howard University, and caring for her mother as she battled with debilitating depression, Edim weaves in rapturous tributes to James Baldwin and Alice Walker (The Color Purple’s complicated family dynamics held special resonance), as well as Jamaica Kincaid and Sonia Sanchez (“If I could write like Sonia Sanchez... what words would I choose for my father?”). In the process, Edim beautifully illuminates how discovering or revisiting formative texts can confer all the warmth and wisdom of chatting with a clutch of aunties. This moving autobiography—complete with a reading list—will make a deep impression on book lovers. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
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