Join us this month to discuss Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me by Glory Edim
\nAn insp iring memoir of family\, community\, and resilience\, and an ode to the po wer of books to help us understand ourselves\, from the renowned founder o f Well-Read Black Girl.
\nPlease contact asipple-mcgraw@lexpublib.or g \;or stop by the Eastside Circulation Desk for a copy of the book. C opies are also available on Libby.
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For
Glory Edim\, that &ldquo\;friend of my mind&rdquo\; \;is books. Edim\
, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents\, started the popu
lar Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty\, eventually reaching a c
ommunity of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches fa
r back.
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Edim&rsquo\;s father moved back to Nigeria while
she was still a child\, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic ch
anges and losses for her family. What became an escape\, a safe space\, an
d a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books wer
e where Edim found community\, and as she grew older she discovered author
s and ideas that she wasn&rsquo\;t being taught about in class. Reading wh
erever and whenever she could\, be it in her dorm room or when traveling b
y subway or plane\, she found the Black writers whose words would forever
change her life: Nikki Giovanni\, through children&rsquo\;s poetry cassett
es\; Maya Angelou\, through a critical high school English teacher\; Toni
Morrison\, while attending Morrison&rsquo\;s alma mater\, Howard Universit
y\; Audre Lorde\, on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and he
artbreak\, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others taught her h
ow to value herself by helping her to find her own voice when her mother l
ost 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 a
ssemble them into a portrait of discovery.