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It all began with a T-shirt. On her 32nd birthday, Glory Edim was surprised by a gift from her ex-partner, a custom-made T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Well-Read Black Girl.” When she wore it on the streets of Brooklyn, she was again surprised: People stopped her to talk about books.
Thus began an evolving conversation, first with her fledgling book club, Well-Read Black Girl, which soon attracted acclaimed authors like Tayari Jones (An American Marriage) and Angela Flournoy (The Turner House); then with her premiere virtual literary festival, attended by more than 800 people. Her podcast, Well-Read With Glory Edim, followed. Now, in her plucky, intimate memoir, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me, Edim offers her own story, tethering the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery. It’s reader catnip.
Edim begins each chapter with a list of the authors and books that most influenced her as she came of age, from childhood (My Book of Bible Stories, The Berenstain Bears) through experiencing romantic love for the first time (Romeo and Juliet, Beloved) to her fraught relationship with her aging mother (Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River). She finds solace, wisdom, grace, humor and, especially, support in these tomes as she navigates hard times, and her own writing grows more poignant.
Yet Gather Me is more than an ode to writers spun from a respectful distance: This is a hands-on guidebook to getting by in good (literary) company. Through reading, Edim found stable ground within her fracturing Nigerian immigrant family, and later as a single mom. Writers like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston became her community.
The title borrows a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. . . . It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” Edim writes, “I am never alone. The T-shirt, the books, the authors, the club, the community: Those things are now my bright and roaring fire, my blessed and beautiful universe.” Gather Me is a powerful invitation to join her there.