These essays recall Gomez's 43 years as a black woman, writer, and lesbian-feminist and acclaim the integration of identities in a shifting world that often prefers the simplistic to the complex and authentic. "For me in my forties," Gomez writes," with no children, no property, no savings, embracing the nontraditional roles of lesbian, African-American writer, and the enigmatic gaze of my mother, I am frightened of middle age. If I reject the traditional perception of who I am, who I was supposed to be, with what do I replace it? . . . My mind says there's really no limit. I write, I work as an activist. . . . But to identify myself as only what I do is a mistake that men have made too often throughout history. So what do I make of myself?" She remembers her Catholicism and the power of its passion and ritual; the word bulldagger spoken acceptingly by her grandmother, thus giving the teenage girl a term for her identity; and the trials and exhilaration of learning to swim. These compelling meditations about identity, forebears, aging, and the costliness of silence constitute a story of faith. -- Whitney Scott