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jacalata's review
5.0
It's like being inside someone's head, at once reassuringly and unnervingly familiar and surprisingly different to my own. I wish I was as self aware and honest as she is.
lilaceous's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.5
impact - ⭐️
cohesion of the entries - ⭐️
engaging overall - .5⭐️
would recommend -
would read again - ⭐️
very raw, personal, and honest. the second half had some really insightful and profound observations that i will find myself coming back to.
very raw, personal, and honest. the second half had some really insightful and profound observations that i will find myself coming back to.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Suicidal thoughts, and Racism
octavia_cade's review
5.0
Painfully honest and quietly brutal memoir of a black woman who can "pass" as white, and the compromises she has to choose to make (or not make) pretty much every second of the day. It's exhausting to read, I can't fathom having to live it. The quiet, permeating horror of life in the suburbs, the only black family and always different, as the neighbours are friendly to Derricotte on the one hand and on the other trot off to the club that excludes her because of her race... it's excruciating. That's the two main impressions I get from this book, really. Permeation and exhaustion - or more accurately the realisation of both, because these are compromises and excruciations that I myself will never have to face, and because of that never fully recognised in others.
I'm not even sure that I still do recognise it, at least not fully but this book brought me closer to adequate realisation. It's really powerful stuff - a hard read, sometimes, but a necessary one I think.
I'm not even sure that I still do recognise it, at least not fully but this book brought me closer to adequate realisation. It's really powerful stuff - a hard read, sometimes, but a necessary one I think.
bowierowie's review against another edition
4.0
The chapter that I found to be the most interesting model for me in The Black Notebooks is “The Club.” Something I have been thinking about in relation to my final project for a class I'm taking called "The Writer's Journal" is how to make a timeline and cover events and things I went through over several years in twelve to fifteen pages. After reading “The Club”, I realized that perhaps I could accomplish this by breaking down the material I want to write into months. I began to map out how this would work for the project I’m envisioning, and I think sectioning things off in this way allows me to do a lot more of the type of work that I’m interested in than if I attempted to create a fluid, seamless narrative.
In “The Club” I like how the month subtitles allow Derricotte to not have to explain how things happened over time. We see for ourselves how her feelings of isolation, anger, depression, and longing continued month after month without her having to say ‘And then in December.” We can just get straight to the heart of it. I also liked how sometimes there would be more than one entry for one month and then a few months would be skipped over, ostensibly because Derricotte hadn’t been writing or because what she wrote during those months wasn’t appropriate for this particular chapter.
Furthemore, another thing I gained by attempting to emulate this format was looking at the variety of content Derricotte deals with in each monthly chunk. It is not always the same. Sometimes we get a scene with very little exposition. Other times we get entries that sound like an essay, seeming somewhat calm and detached. Many times we see how her present situation triggers family memories and how those memories fit in with her life today and show her something else about herself, her reactions, and how little racism has changed over the years. Yet, even though the content is not always the same in each monthly section, “The Club” works because Derricotte has given us a sense of time with the monthly subtitles and everything she includes relates to feeling ostracized because of her race and the repercussions of that, which is triggered by her family not being invited to their neighborhood's club in the first place. I’m looking forward to seeing if I accomplish something similarly with my project, which also takes place over approximately six years like Derricotte's The Black Notebooks.
In “The Club” I like how the month subtitles allow Derricotte to not have to explain how things happened over time. We see for ourselves how her feelings of isolation, anger, depression, and longing continued month after month without her having to say ‘And then in December.” We can just get straight to the heart of it. I also liked how sometimes there would be more than one entry for one month and then a few months would be skipped over, ostensibly because Derricotte hadn’t been writing or because what she wrote during those months wasn’t appropriate for this particular chapter.
Furthemore, another thing I gained by attempting to emulate this format was looking at the variety of content Derricotte deals with in each monthly chunk. It is not always the same. Sometimes we get a scene with very little exposition. Other times we get entries that sound like an essay, seeming somewhat calm and detached. Many times we see how her present situation triggers family memories and how those memories fit in with her life today and show her something else about herself, her reactions, and how little racism has changed over the years. Yet, even though the content is not always the same in each monthly section, “The Club” works because Derricotte has given us a sense of time with the monthly subtitles and everything she includes relates to feeling ostracized because of her race and the repercussions of that, which is triggered by her family not being invited to their neighborhood's club in the first place. I’m looking forward to seeing if I accomplish something similarly with my project, which also takes place over approximately six years like Derricotte's The Black Notebooks.
willwrite4chocolate's review against another edition
5.0
I'm not sure about the date I read this, but I really enjoyed it. It was required reading for one of Natalie Goldberg's workhops. As a white girl living in a white suburb of a very segregated city (Columbus, Ohio), it's important to get bounced out of my denial about my own racism. This book was a small, elegant wake up call.
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