These times (like all times) call for Audre Lorde

Democracy is thriving here at Memoiring!

The day after the US election, I gave a talk to a few hundred people at a conference in Scotland about the process of writing a memoir, and about my relationship with my mentally ill mother. Guess what, folks? Compartmentalization works! So how are you doing?

Since then, I’ve found myself feeling queasy. Also, pissed, panicked, sad, activated, and lots of other words you’re not supposed to use around small children or grandmothers. I have not wanted to write. I have wanted to rage.

I’ve also wanted to rock listlessly in a corner.

Media multi-hyphenate, publisher, write, editor, Roxane Gay, at left.

I live in a rural, red county of New York State. Our poverty rate is 15 percent, 3 percent higher than the national average. Public schools consolidate or close here. In my town, people drive an hour for the hospital and 30 minutes for public transportation.

To that end, I’m politically active with my local Democrats group. I also volunteer at my library and support two food scarcity organizations in hopes that folks living here have access to books and food. Sitting with the election results has been hard. No one’s getting cheaper eggs.

I’m an eldest daughter, which, if you’re familiar with the diagnosis, means I’m an overachiever who wants to anticipate people’s feelings, overthink decisions to death, and throw myself at problems until they’re fixed. Listening to political podcasts have actually really helped this past month. (Thanks, Molly Jong Fast!)

All this is to say, I did feel an extra sense of care around what memoir to select for us this month.

TLDR: Memoiring is reading The Selected Works of Audre Lorde this month!

Zoom date is January 6, 2025. Sign up right here, right now — it’s free for subscribers to this newsletter.

Perhaps I take my role here at Memoiring too seriously, but have you read a memoir lately? Nothing good happens in them. (Debate me in the Comments.) I love the genre, obviously. But my point is memoir does not have a “cozy” subgenre like fantasy and mystery do. It has its humorists like Samantha Irby and David Sedaris, sensualists like Glynnis MacNichol and Marguerite Duras, and writers on nature, travel, and interesting obsessions that may tip scales toward feel-good and away from trauma. Still, even transformation memoirs (addiction to recovery, loss of a loved one to grief and acceptance, etc.) must first lead you through spirographs of hell.

I guess what I’m saying is, I didn’t want to heap any extra big emotions on you right now. I didn’t want any more of them myself.

So I turned things over to the Memoiring community. And if you attended our AMAZING author salon with Michele Filgate last week, you got this ballot emailed to you to select the December book.

The Memoiring polls are now closed and votes have been tallied. You chose The Selected Works of Audre Lorde edited by Roxane Gay (WW Norton, 2020) as our December Pick.

Democracy is thriving here at Memoiring!

These times call for Lorde like none other. As media multi-hyphenate Roxane Gay, writes in the book’s introduction,¹ Lorde “forges a space within which we can hold ourselves and each other accountable to both our needs and the greater good.”

Occupying this literary and political space was a strength of Lorde, who died of breast cancer in 1992 at the age of 58. She left us with two genre-defying memoirs, her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and The Cancer Journals, as well as volumes of poems and essays.

Lorde contained multitudes. She embraced “the personal and the political, the spiritual and the secular” in her writing and activism. And she modeled intersectionality by defining herself often as “a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet doing my work, coming to ask you if you're doing yours.”

Lorde’s astonishing, incisive work on race, class, queerness, illness, and womanhood is now canon. And yet her words have also been misrepresented, particularly on social media, where they’ve frequently been drained of their radical context and Black feminist roots.

“Far more than something pretty to parrot,” Gay writes, with this collection “you will be able to appreciate the grace, power, and fierce intelligence of her writing, to understand where she was writing from and why, and to bear witness to all the unforgettable ways she made herself, and all Black women, gloriously visible.”

Sign up here to discuss The Selected Works of Audre Lorde on January 6, 2025 @ 6:30pm ET

More Reading

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times came in second place, just one vote ahead of Amy Tan's illustrated book on birding. Both of these should be pretty kind to your nervous system.

Zoom Gatherings

If you’re having trouble reading, writing, or feeling safe and are craving community, drop a Comment, below. I’m planning on offering some Zoom time together to write, talk a little, and basically not go crazy. I’m thinking every two weeks. Let me know if this sounds helpful to you.

1. Gay’s intro to The Selected Works of Audre Lorde was excerpted in the Paris Review and it does a beautiful job of summarizing the breadth and the importance of Lorde and her work. Worth a read!