Tweet
Just started reading this book Monday by Kym Ragusa. Recommend it to anyone seeking a book to read. Her writing is so real.
The story of how mixed-race children often struggle to belong and to solidify an identity is by now a familiar one—no longer shrouded as it once was in shamed mystery. But when it's not painted in baroque strokes of political or sociological polemics or rage against family dysfunction but rather is delicately drawn, the result is intimately poignant.
In her first book, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (Norton), Kym Ragusa renders such an account of growing up half black, half Italian in a Harlem where neither camp was looking to integrate and her parents were unwilling to marry.
With the heartiness of her father's baked ziti and the briny bite of her grandmother's collard greens, Ragusa draws together her disparate roots and examines how someone who includes so much can be excluded for the same reason. She gives us a child's-eye view of the volatile '70s and a considerably more nuanced portrait of her extended family.
When her mother leaves for Rome to pursue modeling and wealthy men, Ragusa is raised largely by her grandmother, a Harlem political activist. Then, at seven, she begins spending more time with her father and his Sicilian immigrant parents in the Bronx, her fragmented upbringing partially fusing as her grandmothers bridge their cultural divide in her interest. Part of Ragusa's achievement here is that her coming-of-age tale isn't solely defined by race—it's more universal: searching for where one most belongs and finding comfort in one's own skin.
Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging
The story of how mixed-race children often struggle to belong and to solidify an identity is by now a familiar one—no longer shrouded as it once was in shamed mystery. But when it's not painted in baroque strokes of political or sociological polemics or rage against family dysfunction but rather is delicately drawn, the result is intimately poignant.
In her first book, The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (Norton), Kym Ragusa renders such an account of growing up half black, half Italian in a Harlem where neither camp was looking to integrate and her parents were unwilling to marry.
With the heartiness of her father's baked ziti and the briny bite of her grandmother's collard greens, Ragusa draws together her disparate roots and examines how someone who includes so much can be excluded for the same reason. She gives us a child's-eye view of the volatile '70s and a considerably more nuanced portrait of her extended family.
When her mother leaves for Rome to pursue modeling and wealthy men, Ragusa is raised largely by her grandmother, a Harlem political activist. Then, at seven, she begins spending more time with her father and his Sicilian immigrant parents in the Bronx, her fragmented upbringing partially fusing as her grandmothers bridge their cultural divide in her interest. Part of Ragusa's achievement here is that her coming-of-age tale isn't solely defined by race—it's more universal: searching for where one most belongs and finding comfort in one's own skin.
Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging
Comment