Kim McLarin

Womanish explores how being both black and female--not to mention middle-aged--complicates everything from dating to parenting to mental health to race relations. And how one woman responds to those challenges.

A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life

Womanish

The" weathering" hypothesis has been proposed to explain the early health deterioration of Black women--and other marginalized groups--as a consequence of their exposure to negative societal stressors including prejudice, social alienation, institutional bias, political oppression, economic exclusion and racial discrimination. Imbued with unapologetic, raw and unflinching honesty, the essays in Weathering boldly address the the joys and hardships of being an older--i.e. weathered--Black women in contemporary America. Award-winning author Kim McLarin utilizes deeply personal experiences, such as learning to ride a motorcycle, shoot a gun and taking care of an elderly parent, along with those with a broader political context--how she was targeted by a rightwing organization dedicated to attacking faculty who write or teach about racial injustice--to illuminate the pain and power of aging Black women. In the process, McLarin shines a light on a group that is often invisible. Powerfully speaking truth to power, Weathering is an important contribution to the ongoing dialogue about race, aging and feminism.

Weathering

Reveals the complicated relationships of mothers and daughters in the lives of three generations of women, including Grace, a self-made woman determined to avoid the errors of her mother, who had sacrificed her own needs for her children.

A Novel

Jump at the Sun

After a series of stressful personal transitions, Grace Jefferson finds herself in a new house in a new city and in a new career for which she feels dangerously unsuited: a stay-at-home mom. An educated and accomplished modern woman, a child of the Civil Rights dream, she is caught between the only two models of mothering she has ever known—a sharecropping grandmother who abandoned her children to save herself and a mother who sacrificed all to save her kids—as she struggles to find a middle ground. But as the days pass and the pressures mount, Grace begins to catch herself in small acts of abandonment that she fears may foretell a future she is powerless to prevent . . . or perhaps secretly seeks. Jump at the Sun is a novel about an isolating suburban life and the continuing legacy of slavery, about generational change and the price of living the dream for which our parents fought. In her bold and fearless voice, Kim McLarin explores both the highs and lows of being a mother, and how breaking the cycle of suffocation and regret, while infuriatingly difficult, is absolutely necessary.

Award-winning author Kim McLarin takes on James Baldwin's classic novel, Another Country.

Kim McLarin

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