VIDEO: BOOK TALK
She Writes Press, October 5, 2021
A Timely and Necessary Book: These Walls Between Us
Mary Norman and I co-created These Walls Between Us in order to reflect on, and honor, the still-evolving sixty-year connection between us and to chronicle how we came to call each other friends. Though we are close in age, we met in my mother’s kitchen; Mary was the Black domestic worker and I the privileged white daughter. In our thirties, Mary suggested that we write a book about our friendship, and I said yes. While I focused on the writing, Mary co-created the content through visits, phone calls, emails, road trip conversations and, most recently, texting. My work as a co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a widely-selling resource on women’s health and sexuality, had prompted me to face my unexamined biases around class and race. These Walls Between Us offers lessons from my oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend. We'd love to visit your book group or anti-racism group via Zoom!
AWARDS
Nautilus Awards 2022: Better Books for a Better World, SILVER in Memoir
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Eric Hoffer Book Awards 2022: Finalist for Grand Prize and First Horizon Award, Honorable Mention in Memoir
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Chanticleer International Book Awards 2021: Short Listed for Hearten Book Award for Uplifting and Inspirational Non-Fiction
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Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition 2021: A Notable 100 Book
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Best Book Awards 2021: Finalist in Multicultural Nonfiction
“Unless the white community breaks its silence and determines that race is not a peripheral issue, but an issue central to the things that we say are valuable to America . . . the finest movement in the world will not cause racism to cease.”
— Reverend James Lawson