Hello my lovely readers!
In this second installment of Author Spotlight, I want to introduce you to the author whose book shaped me as a young Black woman in her early 20s navigating the journalism industry.
Say hello to Kim McLarin!
She is the author of three novels, Taming it Down, Meeting of the Waters and Jump at the Sun. McLarin co-authored the book Growing Up X by Ilyasah Shabazz and is the author of several essay collections and memoirs. Her work has also appeared in several publications including Glamour, the Washington Post, The Root and The Boston Globe to name a few.
I absolutely loved her first novel Taming it Down because I saw so much of myself in it as a young Black journalist. I was similar to the main character Hope in many ways with having to navigate dealing with the distrust I would receive from the Black community and proving myself to my white colleagues. Just like Hope, I reached the point in my career where I found myself and could be free...after many missteps along the way.
Her second novel Meeting of the Waters dealt with a Black reporter and a white reporter falling in love during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and navigating their way through an interracial relationship.
In a 2006 piece for the New York Times, she questions how to deal with race in interracial relationships and why she eventually had to walk away from that relationship.
Jerry was a good man who worked with troubled kids and lived his life open to relationships with people of different races. And yet I couldn’t be with him, even though, unlike my ex, he did seem willing to grapple with race. But he was nearly 50 and his grappling apparently was just beginning, whereas mine started at 5. For nearly 50 years he’d lived in America and yet it surprised him that race might even be an issue for us. There was an innocence in this, an innocence born of being white. An innocence I could neither share nor abide.
I found this piece to be very insightful regarding interracial relationships and their dynamics. It's what I've always enjoyed about McLarin's writing, she puts the uncomfortable topics that readers do not want to have a conversation about in your face and forces you to talk about them.
Another example, more recently, in a 2019 article for The Washington Post she asks if Black women and white women can be friends.
Yet rarely do white feminists take up the greater cause of black female inequity. White women are among the most vocal and vociferous opponents of affirmative action, despite being equal, if not greater, beneficiaries.
This is what black women know: When push comes to shove, white women choose race over gender: Every. Single. Time.
This, of course, drew the ire from numerous people (particularly white) in the comments, which was expected. The question and conversation that Black women have always faced and talked about (among their peers), but something white people have never had to confront.
It was her novel Jump at the Sun that made me truly question the role of motherhood and marriage for Black women for the first time ever. I read it when I was single and in my 20s, but now as a married woman and one who wants to be a mother, it does force me to grapple with the thoughts of if becoming a wife and mother means losing myself.
Jump at the Sun was the 2007 Fiction Honor Book Winner by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. The novel tells the story of Grace Jefferson, Ph.D. who seems to have it all with her successful husband, upscale suburban lifestyle, beautiful home and loving children. However, she has to decide whether she wants to follow her mother's self-sacrificial modeling of parenting or be like her free-spirited Grandma Rae who abandoned her children.
I really loved this book and can't wait to re-read it in the new stage of my life.
McLarin is currently a Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies at Emerson College.
She's currently working on a book that will be released in November 2023. I don't know if it's fiction or non-fiction....admittedly, I've only read her fiction works, but I'm going to dabble in her non-fiction works soon because I find her fascinating. I'll leave this quote from her in a 2008 interview with the online magazine Literary Mama about why she is a writer.
I write because I have to and because I cannot imagine not doing so. Writing is how I make sense of the world and how I live in a world that so very often makes no sense at all. It’s no exaggeration to say that writing has saved my life....the bottom line is that I write because that’s who I am: a writer. I write because God intended me to.
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