In the Country of Women: A Memoir

I saw Susan Straight on a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books, shortly before this book was released. It has been on my radar ever since, though I have not read any of her other books. I found it on Hoopla (accidentally), and immediately checked it out.

This book is a love letter to her 3 adult daughters. It is history, biography, memoir, autobiography, family history. In particular she looks at all of the women who have led to their existing--her own Swiss-immigrant mother, who ran from a marriage to a local pig farmer arranged by her own stepmother, eager to get her out of the house. Her mother's mother, who died young. That stepmother, who did not like her stepchildren, but whose own children and nieces/nephews are happy to host show more their families and do consider them all family. Her high-school-sweetheart ex-husband's mother Alberta, a black woman from the south, and her many sisters and aunts and cousins. The events that led all of these women to Riverside, California, where they all ended up living in a 6-block area that Straight still lives in today.

The men are here too, but often they were difficult or died young or chose a second wife over their own children. Or they themselves fled a stepparent when young, starting over with no family nearby. And many families had large families with more girls than boys, so those girls stuck together always, raising each others' children or providing shelter as needed.

Straight tells a fabulous story. Food, place, family. Fear, racial discrimination, police actions, friends that become family. Visiting her step-grandmother's family in Switzerland. Growing up poor, living in Riverside when a/c wasn't a thing, working in fields or factories. Loving to read and write and learn. It's all here, and it is all wonderful. show less

I'd read Straight's books I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen And Licked Out All The Pots (1992) and Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights (1994) and was always curious about her comfort and familiarity with African American families (she was clearly Caucasian in the book flap). My "aha" came from the cover of her memoir, with its three adorable mixed race girls. In 1979, Straight married Dwayne, her high school boyfriend, and they became the junction not only of their daughters, but for two incredible families with disparate trunks, limbs, branches, and leaves. The best of times were the frequent driveway gatherings of Dwayne's large clan, with the mandatory inclusion of each woman's unique side dish, and Straight's visits with Dwayne and the girls show more to the Heidi-like mountain village in Switzerland where her mother was born. But this is mostly a story of Riverside, CA, on the wrong side of LA but with welcoming room for every imaginable nationality. The author is frank and honest about her divorce and about her neglectful father, and about her gratitude for the acceptance and love of Dwayne's family, due primarily to Straight's desire for inclusion and their own love for her daughters. Missing and sorely missed: family trees.

Quotes: "Some Americans have tried to make slavery a single chapter in the nation's history, a finite number of years that ceases influence at the end of the Civil War. Tell this to the thousands of black women and men killed in carefully planned acts of retribution or for casual sport."

"I was trying to explain to someone how we grew up. I was like, wait - what's below humble?" show less

I liked the first section of this book, when the author tells the story of all of her forebears, but I got bored when I hit the second part and she started talking about her family and relationship. She seems to think she's a big deal because she's a blond married to a black guy. Yawn.

2019 "One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

“Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories "