A friend of mine just came back from a memoir-writing workshop. We talked about it on a walk around the duck pond near our houses. You need to have a narrative, my friend said. You need to have yourself as a character. You need to have a focus and a lens and a frame and basically, you can’t be all rambly (like I often am).
The Song and the Silence is rambly. It’s a unfocused. Neither means that it isn’t compelling, but it’s muddled. Johnson discovers her grandfather appeared in a 1960s television documentary about desegregation attempts in Mississippi. Her grandfather, a black singing waiter at a white’s only restaurant, detailed how no matter what, around the white restaurant patrons, he smiles. He smiles but that doesn’t mean he’s happy. As the book’s blurb says: he described what life was truly like for the black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.
Except the book isn’t about Johnson’s grandfather. It’s about Johnson discovering about her grandfather, and maybe it would just be better about her grandfather. I’m rarely a fan of making the discoverer the protagonist rather than the person who is being discovered. As an example, I don’t really need to read about Johnson having a fight with her mother about whether her kids can watch some Disney movie or not. If that fight could somehow be tied back into the struggle Johnson’s grandfather endured, then maybe. But the clumps where Johnson writes about her own life are not deftly woven in to her grandfather’s story. Johnson works hard to make this a memoir, when maybe this was better suited as a non-fiction about her grandfather’s life. Her writing is stronger not writing about herself.
I just don’t know what I was supposed to take away from this experience.
The Song and the Silence by Yvette Johnson went on sale May 2, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.