In “Gather Me”, Glory Edim describes reading to save her own life

Recently I heard a writer at a book festival say that reading and writing saved his life. Then, they quickly added, “not literally like a doctor or heart surgeon would do.” Glory Edim makes the case for literal literary salvation in her gripping debut memoir, “Gather Me.” A love letter to reading written in a simple style like the fables she adored and memorized as a child, it is aptly subtitled: A memoir in praise of the books that saved me.

As a literary curator, Edim is best known as the founder of Well Read Black Girl, an online platform and book club that organizes events in support of black literature, including an annual book festival. As editor of two WRBG anthologies, she focuses on representation in literature and honors the stories and storytellers who shape writers. One of the books that shaped Edim was “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, from which she got her title: “She is a Friend of My Spirit.” She brought me together, man. The pieces that I am, she puts them together and gives them back to me in the right order.

When asked to “get over my weight since the age of 13”, essentially fleeting at the age of 18, Edim writes that books were the only constant, that “friend of my mind” when the relationship of her parents deteriorated, her father abruptly returned to Nigeria, and she became the primary caretaker of her two younger siblings and eventually her mother – all before becoming a truly adult herself.

Edim was able to “get by in a book” from the age of 3. His mother had been a primary school teacher in Nigeria and read Edim religiously from a big yellow book of Bible stories. (Oprah, Edim jokes, was their other religion.) His father, a Howard University-trained architect, made him believe that there were stories all around them and that he could “pluck them out of the sky “. Even their courtship was through letters, but despite a “sweet and sour discussion” between them, his parents divorced when Edim was 8 years old. When her mother’s boyfriend entered their life, Edim began “consuming survival stories” – “Hatchet,” “Little Women,” “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Scream.” She Finds Her Greatest Survivor in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” heroine, Janie Crawford, “a woman who stood against society, who bounced from one tragic situation to another It was a bit.” over her head the first time she read it as a young teenager (following a recommendation from Oprah), but she returned to it several times, even reading it aloud in its entirety while she stood in her dorm room, “desperate to read it.” to understand the magnificence of the book… Hurston’s story had changed me as much as my little brother’s birth.

At the local public library, Edim taught her brother to read and took off her shoes as if she were in her own living room. She was cared for by the librarian who reminded her and her brother to care for their books like a parent would, and by fictional characters like Cassie Logan and Jo March, “all the friends whose I needed.” Edim is tempted to choose these fictional characters rather than real ones, but the Eritrean twins in her new apartment building, her “Mars twins,” as she called them, “have withdrawn into their friendship.” This is one of many pivotal moments where reading, at first solitary, builds a bridge to a community and teaches Edim to navigate it.

Edim describes a practice session with a beloved English teacher over his depressing comment on Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; it’s a study in respectful disagreement: “Even though he didn’t completely agree with me, I think I changed my mind a little.” Or maybe I gave him something to think about. And at least he treated me with the kind of respect and consideration I hadn’t felt from an adult since I lost my father. …I sometimes still find myself arguing with Mr. Burns in my head. That same frankness and courage were evident during the first book club she convened to discuss “Between the World and Me,” where men dominated the conversation. “I wanted to speak in an unfiltered, vulnerable, honest way, and listen to others do the same, and I knew I would only find comfort in doing so with other women,” she recalls. “Particularly black women. »

In a particularly poignant passage, after having mothered his brother despite being in trouble with the law, Edim mothers his mother when she falls into an inexplicable silence. She turns to Audre Lorde’s collection, “Sister Outsider,” in search of “something, anything, that would help me understand the silence that kept growing inside my mother like a tumor , like a debt – the way night invades a room. in the middle of winter you crawl slowly and then suddenly you find yourself sitting in the dark.

There are breathtaking scenes of loss in this book, but also fun and humor amid the tragedy (one involving a breast bite and another a makeup experiment gone wrong) . Edim never leaves the reader in the dark. They will find themselves hunched over and taking notes for the literary prescription of a thorny life question and likely thinking about banned books and the threat they pose. But above all, ask themselves which books helped them rise, which books saved them and which one to choose next.

GATHER ME: A memoir in praise of the books that saved me

By Glory Edim

Ballantine, 288 pages, $28

Dionne Ford is the author of “Go Back and Get It Back: A Memoir on Race, Legacy, and Intergenerational Healing.”