The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

I happened across Alice's latest while seeking something, anything to read during the weekend immediately after September 11. The introduction simultaneously broke my heart and gave me hope for a better tomorrow. Once I got home, I immediately typed up the majority of the introduction and sent it onto my friends. Many responded thanking me for sending this onto them.While many of the other reviewers are correct in saying that some of the stories are difficult to understand and others scattered and incosistent, I find this part of the books charm. It is unvarnished, sometimes very thoughtful, other times angry, and still other times conciliatory. In short...it is very real.If you don't want to think and be challenged, avoid the book. If you want a challenge, pick it up. Nobody says you have to agree with it all, but I for one am thankful that a person such as Alice is willing to bare her soul in such a way that is so provocotive.I am honestly a bit surprised by the venom of some of the reviews.

This is my first Alice Walker book -- I saw The Color Purple several times, but had not read any of her work. Two weeks ago, this book spoke to me from the shelves of a Seattle-area bookstore, and so I took it home. I read it this past weekend, in an introspective mood due to the death of a friend and my spouse's move back to PA later this month.It was a beautiful book - lyrical and matter-of-fact at the same time (the casual mention of a gun in the bedroom in the 60s in Mississippi). As a southern woman (about a decade younger than Ms. Walker), I appreciated seeing my home from another perspective. I felt more kindly towards my own eccentric relatives and laughed at the thought of taking my own mother and her sisters to see "Deep Throat"! (no way am I that brave - or foolhardy!)I laughed and I cried and felt reassured that wisdom is possible with perseverance. And I was inspired to read more Alice Walker - plus I'll share this copy with my friends. Highly recommended.

Walker is, in this book, as always, compelling and lyrical, binding the soul of the reader into the souls of her characters. I wept, actually, reading "To My Young Husband", a story that resonates so painfully right now in my life as my young husband divorces me for another woman. But as I read, and read these stories of broken hearts, of broken dreams, I realized that this book lacked what I desperately desired: an easy answer, a simple way forward. How DO I survive this? It seems that Walker's characters simply limp on, terminally scarred, never recovering, just surviving. And maybe, just possibly, that will be the way for me; I will go on, but never recover. I lack any sisters to go on midnight swims with, I lack an Auntie Putt-Putt to tell me how much more terrible things could be. Perhaps this book holds too much of brutal reality, that innocence and joy, once lost, cannot be regained. This is not a book of hope, or cheery good endings, of neatly tied strings. It is not "Echinacea And Tofu Soup For The Soul". But it is beautiful, and terrible, and true, and well worth reading many times.

Alice Walker has returned with what is certainly her best work in years. After releasing the self-indulgent essays in "The Same River Twice" and "Anything You Love Can Be Saved" and the mediocre "coming out" novel "By the Light of My Father's Smile" (as a Walker novel it's standard fare; as a "coming out" story it's disappointing- lesser artist have done better)Walker returns with a collection of short stories that ranks among her novels "The Color Purple," "The Temple of My Familiar" and "Possessing the Secret to Joy." At first one may be tempted to think that these stories are merely Walker's version of the cliche "If it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger" but these stories go deeper than that, particularly in "To My Young Husband- Memoir of a Marriage," the autobiographical piece in which Walker recounts her marriage to a white, Jewish civil rights lwayer in Mississippi during the '60's. There is an ache that runs through this piece that the reader actually feels as they're reading it. There is also the hilarious story "The Brotherhood of the Saved" in which the protaganist takes her elderly mother and aunts to see an adult film; deals with her relationship with her father and "The Brotherhood" who are meddling- sorry- trying to help save her uncle's soul before his death after years of descrimination. There is also the wonderful story of Orelia and John that follows "Memoir of a Marriage," in which a woman is contemplating an affair with a colleague, but instead tells her partner about her feelings and they work through them together, loving their way back to each other. This book assert that, as Walker told NPR in a recent interview, "you can bear the unbearable" because "the way forward is with a broken heart."

This is a beautiful book. It is a collection of related stories about love and heartbreak, but typical of Alice Walker, it is never bitter. When reading something that I know is autobiographical, the temptation is strong to wonder which parts "really happened" and which are made up or embellished. However, I found myself letting go of that urge once I sank into the book (which I read in one afternoon). Every word that Alice Walker writes is true - it doesn't matter which details were made up or changed, Alice Walker always writes of truth and beauty.