Hanging by her teeth
Author: Greer, Bonnie
Traveling around the United States and Europe looking for her lost father, a
Black American woman writes him imaginary letters
New York: Serpent's Tail, 1995, copyright 1994, 165p.
Kirkus Reviews In her debut novel, playwright Greer infuses the oft-told story
of a woman's search for self with a rich African-American flavor. After years
of trying everything (the Women's Collective, the Black Women's Collective,
the Black Lesbians' Collective, etc.) and supporting every political activist
from Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers, confused, 45-year-old Lorraine
finds herself teaching Shakespeare at Our Lady Queen of Peace High School in
South London. No matter how often she tells herself that she's grown up, no
matter how much she wants to settle down with the nice head teacher from Barbados,
Lorraine is still obsessed with the father who abandoned her as a child, still
torn between the professional expectations for today's African-American woman
and her lust for freedom, travel, alcohol, and the blues. Bittersweet letters
from Lorraine to her father, which go back as far as the early 1960s, poignantly
trace her past: her birth in Chicago to a mother who wanted to be a painter
but had a vision when pregnant and became a preacher instead; her inability
to see her own reflection since the age of 10, when her father made a secret
visit and gave her a seashell-encrusted mirror she immediately shattered; her
passion for white men; and her discovery that her father is not dead as her
mother claimed but has become an expatriate. After Lorraine's mother passes
away, she begins a quest for her father that takes her from Amsterdam to Paris
to London (here Greer tips her hat to the generations of American artists who
went to Europe to find themselves) and realizes she has not really been looking
for her father at all. Greer takes a powerful and refreshingly unusual stand,
rejecting conventional notions of home and roots in favor of singularity and
independence that add a new dimension to standard conceptions of black heritage
and power.
(Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1994)
Other titles associated with this book:
By her teeth hanging
ISBNs Associated with this Title:
1852421851
Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Novelist/EBSCO Publishing
• Baker & Taylor
• Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 031142