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    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
    Audiobook10 hours

    In the Country of Women: A Memoir

    Written by Susan Straight

    Narrated by Donna Postel

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.

    In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight-and eventually her three daughters-heard for decades the stories of Dwayne's female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Susan's family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward-from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.

    A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan-those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, Straight writes, "The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781684575862
    In the Country of Women: A Memoir
    Author

    Susan Straight

    Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com. 

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      The honesty, sorrows and joys.
      Why do I need to write 5 more words.