Here is the next memoir I read, after Joan Didion’s, as inspired by that NYT list. This is a statement by a black intellectual to his 15-year-old son, about life as a black person and the struggles and dangers he faces in the world. It’s heartfelt and moving and grim and blunt. Its function to readers like me is to reveal perspectives I’ve never had, and couldn’t even imagine.
The book came out in 2015 and I have the 20th printing — with blurbs on the cover about it being a bestseller, and a National Book Award winner. So I didn’t buy it when first published. Its subject is nothing obviously up my alley. Presumably after a year of acclaim, and since frankly that it was short!, I did buy a copy, in April 2016.