The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart - Hardcover

Walker, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679455876 ISBN 13: 9780679455875

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

"These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. I found myself unmoored, unmated, ungrounded in a way that challenged everything I'd ever thought about human relationships. Situated squarely in that terrifying paradise called freedom, precipitously out on so many emotional limbs, it was as if I had been born; and in fact I was being reborn as the woman I was to become."

So says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker about her beautiful new book, in which "one of the best American writers today" (The Washington Post) gives us superb stories based on rich truths from her own experience. Imbued with Walker's wise philosophy and understanding of people, the spirit, sex and love, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart begins with a lyrical, autobiographical story of a marriage set in the violent and volatile Deep South during the early years of the civil rights movement. Walker goes on to imagine stories that grew out of the life following that marriage—a life, she writes, that was "marked by deep sea-changes and transitions." These provocative stories showcase Walker's hard-won knowledge of love of many kinds and of the relationships that shape our lives, as well as her infectious sense of humor and joy. Filled with wonder at the power of the life force and of the capacity of human beings to move through love and loss and healing to love again, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart is an enriching, passionate book by "a lavishly gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review).

About this title

Review:

Even a fickle reader of Alice Walker will find something to admire in The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. This tender, elegiac collection of stories is based in part on her early marriage to a white man and her continuing puzzlement at how their connection--once so charmed and resilient--faded to nothing. Looking back at their happy years together in "the racially volatile and violent Deep South state of Mississippi," a place and time in which their union was not only unconventional but illegal, Walker is also led to imagine other, less metaphoric homecomings. After the initial autobiographical story, "To My Young Husband," she turns to a character named Rosa, a novelist like herself, who returns home to the South with her sister, Barbara, after their grandfather's death. Rosa had not made it to the funeral, since news of his death arrived just as she was leaving on a long-planned holiday abroad. Now, belatedly, she has come to gather family stories. But when she asks her Aunt Lily a question, this woman glares back at her with something close to hatred: "I don't want to find myself in anything you write. And you can just leave your daddy alone too." Reeling, Rosa turns to her sister for comfort, but Barbara, too, rejects her with "a look that said she'd got the reply she'd deserved."

For wasn't she always snooping about the family's business and turning things about in her writing in ways that made the family shudder? There was no talking to her as you talked to regular people. The minute you opened your mouth a meter went on. Rose could read all this on her sister's face. She didn't need to speak. And it was a lonely feeling that she had. For Barbara was right. Aunt Lily too. And she could no more stop the meter running than she could stop her breath.

With her characteristic insight and her slow, colloquial prose--seeded with anger but watered with hope--Walker explores the territory of her own broken heart and those of African Americans of her generation. --Regina Marler

From the Back Cover:

"Places Walker in the company of Faulkner."
--The Nation, about The Color Purple

"Superb...a work to stand beside literature of any time and place."
--San Francisco Chronicle, about The Color Purple

"Just when you think Alice Walker has empathized her way as far as any writer can go, she goes further....Each essay is a gift."
--Gloria Steinem, about Anything We Love Can Be Saved

"[Alice Walker] is exceptionally brave: She takes on subjects at which most writers would flinch and quail, and probably fail. She shrinks from no moral or emotional complexity, and she writes consummately skillful short stories....In Walker's work nothing is ordinary....She is a marvelous writer."
--San Francisco Chronicle, about You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

"A writer of staggering talent."
--New York Newsday

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0679455876
• ISBN 13: 9780679455875
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224