Grown Women

May 15, 2024
Four generations of Black American women navigate the peril and love of the mother-daughter bond. This absorbing debut begins in a Tennessee delivery room and ends with a funeral. At the start, a teenage mother, recently fled from a posh Atlanta home, watches her newborn wail but doesn't comfort her. "'It will get easier, ' the nurse said, but Charlotte knew that it wouldn't." Already cynical, Charlotte isn't wrong--she has a cocaine habit by page 10--but she isn't completely right, either. The story takes a lively tour of the complexities of family and most especially the sins of Charlotte's mother, a frosty academic, Dr. Evelyn Gwendolyn Jackson. She makes her first appearance in the life of her unaware granddaughter, Corrina, as a TV talking head. Charlotte drinks, fights, dwells in poverty, ever determined to bury the tie. But when Corrina, still in high school, gives birth to her own daughter, Camille, the baby represents a chance to do better for three generations of tough, traumatized women. This is not a subtle book--"Corinna's shoulders dropped so heavily with relief that Charlotte thought her arms might dislocate and fall right to the floor"--but it moves briskly. It is wise to class markers and human contradiction. The women are awash in alcohol, but function; pummeled by violence, but still rise. The men are peripheral, and more surprisingly, so is church. Called to restart yet again, Charlotte reflects, "That's something people liked to say. 'We owe it to our ancestors.' But perhaps she owed it just as much, if not more, to her descendants." A vivid line of women inches toward a place where it isn't always the mother's fault.

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Starred review from May 20, 2024
Johnson debuts with a deeply satisfying multigenerational saga of a Black family. Evelyn was brought up in 1940s Atlanta with the expecation that she succeed. As a young mother and widow in the 1970s, her success in academia comes at the expense of her daughter, Charlotte, who only feels her mother’s coldness and resentment. When Evelyn erupts at the news of 18-year-old Charlotte’s unexpected pregnancy in 1974, she flees home and builds a new life in rural Tennessee. Charlotte struggles with alcoholism and the effects of assorted bad decisions, which have an acidic effect on her daughter, Corinna, who doesn’t feel accepted by her mother. Searching for love, Corinna has a brief relationship with a high school football star and becomes pregnant at 17. She vows to provide her daughter, Camille, with the love she yearned for as a girl, but soon becomes overwhelmed and makes the difficult decision to send Camille to Evelyn, who is now a professor at Howard University. Johnson brings new life to the age-old theme of a family’s cyclical dysfunction, and the narrative is packed with stunning self-reflections, such as Charlotte’s reason for naming her daughter after the song “Corrina, Corrina” (“It had always made her sad, like looking at this baby”). This is a revelation. Agent: Susan Ginsburg, Writers House.