Hi everyone, here are the notes from our April Book Club meeting.

The SSC Library Adult Book Club met, via Zoom, on Friday, April 10, 2020.

We discussed our April read, Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. The author packs quite a bit into the 192-page book. The book has several major themes, it is a coming of age story, a learning how to deal, or not deal, with loss story, the story of young black girls growing up in a changing Brooklyn in the 1970s, a story of childhood friendship; and how those formative friendships sometimes don’t survive the transition from childhood into adulthood; and it a story that emphasizes how important memories our in our lives.

The story chronicles the experiences of August, who as the book opens, is introduced as an anthropologist in her thirties who has come back to Brooklyn to bury her father and assist in clearing out his apartment. She has a meal with her brother at a dinner after their father’s funeral, and then heads to the subway to go back to her father’s apartment and runs into a former childhood friend, Sylvia. And it is this brief encounter with a former friend that she does not want to see, that triggers her remembrances of her childhood. August’s remembrances of two major things weave the threads of the book together, the first is her inability as a child to remember her mother’s death, and the second, consists of the memories she has of her close childhood friendship with three girls – Sylvia, Gigi and  Angela.

Woodson’s story isn’t completely linear. At the beginning of the book we meet the adult August and then the story flashes back to her youth with the ghost of her mother’s death hanging over the story.

August remembers moving to Brooklyn with her father and brother when she was eleven years old. And she remembers that she was born in SweetGrove, Tennessee and as a young child lived with her parents and younger brother in a run-down house on land her mother’s family owned. August’s maternal uncle, Clyde, was a frequent visitor and it was clear that Clyde and his sister, August’s mother, were close. Clyde was drafted, went to Vietnam, and was killed in combat. And the loss of her brother was something August’s mother could not accept. For most of the book the reader gets the impression that August’s mother is dead, but it is only in the last chapter of the book that we get conformation of that fact; when August remembers a trip she took at age 16 with her father and brother to the old family home in SweetGrove, during which she seemed to finally remember that her mother committed suicide by walking into the water of the small lake on the property.

And of her friendship with her close childhood friends, August remembers that soon after arriving in Brooklyn, she met and formed a friendship with three other girls, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. The girls took comfort from their friendship, hanging out with each other during the day at school and after school too, and supported each other to the hilt. They took shelter from life’s difficulties together, and then began to drift apart when two of the girls were sent private schools, Gigi to a performing arts school, and Sylvia to a Catholic school. The final spike that broke apart their friendship occurred when August was 15 and Sylvia took up with the boyfriend August had recently broken up with, a betrayal August could not, and cannot forgive, even as an adult when she encounters Sylvia in a subway station.

So, it is loss, and the remembrances of events that are the foundation pillars of the book. It seems that the remembrances of the childhood losses of her mother and her friends and the inability of August to overcome them, have greatly impacted the course of her life.

And indeed, those losses began to impact the course of her life when she was a youth.

The loss of her mother and the loss of her close friends, soaked August to the bone, from an emotional point of view, and she has not been able to move on from those losses and establish new, close relationships with others.

We see this in the glimpses we have of August as an adult, an anthropologist who takes refuge in her work, who studies cultural death rituals, who lives an academic based nomadic lifestyle and has had many lovers but never yet married or had children of her own. In the way she couldn’t remember her mother’s death until she was 16 and visited the old family property in SweetGrove, and in the way she couldn’t manage to stop and talk to her old friend Sylvia in the subway station after her father’s funeral. These points indicate that August is trying to avoid the deeper connections that close friends and family offer in this life to avoid the pain of loss. One might hope that August will grow and mature, and by her forties, perhaps she will branch out and find the deep joy that close relationships with family and friends brings. Perhaps one day Woodson will write a sequel and we will find out!

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The next Adult Book Club will be held, via Zoom, on Friday, May 8, start time: 2:00 p.m. Send me an email and I’ll send you the Zoom link on Monday, May 4, 2020.

My email address is: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Hope to “see” everyone on May 8 and stay well everyone!

Linda Reimer, SSCL