Very good semi-autobiographical account of a summer spent in the south. ( )

Bebe Moore Campbell, who suffered an untimely death from brain cancer in 2005, was from my same generation. Thus in reading her heart-warming memoir, I found that many of her memories of growing up were similar to mine. This made the book very fun for me to read. She also had an engaging way of writing that combined both humor and poetic qualities. She seemed like someone with whom I could have been good friends.

She was born in 1950 in Philadelphia. Her father, George Moore, was involved in a car crash that left him a paraplegic when Bebe was just ten months old. Soon thereafter, her parents separated. Her father moved back to his childhood home in North Carolina. As a young girl, she spent every summer with her father.

When she got older and found out that her father’s accident was his own fault, she was angry with him for a long time. But she was forgetting the price he himself had to pay, living his life confined to a wheelchair:

"How he forced the sadness from his eyes I do not know. Only one time did I witness him mourning the life he might have had. It was a terrible moment, but a healing one. That split second taught me that the best part of my father, the jewel stuck deep inside his core, was determination.”

Campbell was never satisfied with just summers – she wanted men in her life everyday instead of being surrounded and dominated by The Bosoms, as she called her mother and grandmother and aunt:

"If Sundays gave me a dependable supply of prayerful men, then during the week men were a piecemeal affair, a patchwork quilt I stitched together from whatever brilliant scraps of biceps and aftershave I could find.”

A self-professed “daddy’s girl,” she begins her book with her father George Moore's death in 1977 from another car accident. She writes of the North Carolina funeral, and of the many uncles and lifelong friends of her father:

"My loss was more than his death, much more…. My father took to his grave the short-sleeved, beer-swilling men of summer, big bellies, raucous laughter, pipe smoke and the aroma of cigars," she mourned. "My daddy is really gone and his vacant place is my cold, hard border. As always, my life is framed by his absence."

At his funeral, she wrote:

"It is still cool in North Carolina in April, a perfect time for a family reunion. Crowded in Grandma’s yard were all the faces that looked like her face, the resemblance lying somewhere between the chin and the character lines that ran straight across high foreheads.”

It causes her to look back and remember her early memories of her father:

“I was seven years old, sitting on the front steps waiting for my dad to come and take me to summer.”

She always got nervous and excited waiting for her daddy:

"I sat down, slipping my thumb back into my mouth. My right fingers rubbed my ear vigorously, so that all I could hear was a thin noise going thickathickathickathicka…”

[That had to be my favorite passage in the whole book. Who doesn't remember those bizarre insecure behaviors we did as children?]

Her mother, Doris Carter Moore, was a social worker who believed in high achievement and “correct” speaking. She observes, “The Bosoms wanted me to Be Somebody, to be the second generation to live out my life as far away from a mop and scrub brush and Miss Ann’s floors as possible.”

And achieve she did, graduating summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh, and becoming an acclaimed journalist and novelist. She attributes much of her accomplishments to having the love and support of her family, even if its members didn't all live together.

Evaluation: I laughed and cried with Bebe Moore Campbell while reading this memoir. The love and pain she felt over her father is so palpable you can feel it and taste it as you read. She laments, “My loss goes beyond the grave of my father; the void is vast and disorienting at times, causing me to grope and stumble until I feel the invisible props that will always support me.” In her acknowledgments, she writes:

"… I thank God for strong, black men who are good fathers regardless of what else they are not, and whose love for their children is their faith in a brighter tomorrow.”

Although she wrote a number of books before she died, it is sad to consider that she will write no more. This book a lovely tribute to her family, who helped Campbell become what she did, and in particular to her father, whom she loved fiercely. ( )