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srividyaupp 's review for:
American Spy
by Lauren Wilkinson
I’m back where I was when I started this book. My throat is choked, but my eyes are dry. My heart aches so badly I can feel it behind my diaphragm. I want the America Marie wants for her children. I want her children to know her. I want her to have been successful in her last mission.
Her love, her loss, her sharp intellect, I love it all. Marie is both bits of who I have seen in myself, who I want to be, and simply an other yet kindred spirit of a character.
When I was thirteen, I read Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary. And without pause, not a week has gone by in the ten years since where I have not thought or imagined myself as Secretary of State. But, in the last five years, as I have uncovered the taint of American foreign policy and foreign espionage, and worst, imperialism, I can’t dream it as well anymore. It tugs at me like it does Marie. On the one hand, her wish for her children is my ambition for myself and my generation - I want to “resist injustice…love fiercely and freely. In those ways… be [a] good American.” But I am also like Marie in that I would rather be in the thick of it, doing the right I could, to elevate myself above the law to see and scourge the cracks in the system by being in the law.
It’s funny. I realize, reading this was beautiful for all the ways in which I explored a Black woman of Harlem edging into the old boys game of foreign espionage and world power - a world I will never know. But it was also reading of myself, opening myself and seeing through Marie’s insights, what questions I have to ask myself. And what answers have been within me, but worded here and now by Wilkerson’s extraordinary novel.
Her love, her loss, her sharp intellect, I love it all. Marie is both bits of who I have seen in myself, who I want to be, and simply an other yet kindred spirit of a character.
When I was thirteen, I read Madeleine Albright’s Madam Secretary. And without pause, not a week has gone by in the ten years since where I have not thought or imagined myself as Secretary of State. But, in the last five years, as I have uncovered the taint of American foreign policy and foreign espionage, and worst, imperialism, I can’t dream it as well anymore. It tugs at me like it does Marie. On the one hand, her wish for her children is my ambition for myself and my generation - I want to “resist injustice…love fiercely and freely. In those ways… be [a] good American.” But I am also like Marie in that I would rather be in the thick of it, doing the right I could, to elevate myself above the law to see and scourge the cracks in the system by being in the law.
It’s funny. I realize, reading this was beautiful for all the ways in which I explored a Black woman of Harlem edging into the old boys game of foreign espionage and world power - a world I will never know. But it was also reading of myself, opening myself and seeing through Marie’s insights, what questions I have to ask myself. And what answers have been within me, but worded here and now by Wilkerson’s extraordinary novel.