These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class

Written by Wendy Sanford

Narrated by Wendy Sanford

From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a sixty-year friendship across racial and class divides. Sanford, who is white, explores her formation in a narrow world of privilege, lifts up the writings and social movements that changed her life, and reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers. She highlights Mary Norman’s part in the Great Migration of African Americans from south to north, her groundbreaking work as the first woman officer a New Jersey county corrections system, and her guiding ethic of care. Together, they confront the obstacles – in society and in Sanford herself – to building lifelong friendship.These two complex and accomplished women will stay with you. Their story sparks conversation and change. A white woman’s necessary learning, and a Black woman’s resolute survival, make These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.” (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.)

Audiobook Bonus Intro and Afterword: Co-creators Wendy Sanford and Mary Norman in Conversation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wendy Sanford
• Release date: Mar 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9798868691690

Wendy Sanford

Wendy Sanford grew up in an upper-middle-class white suburban family in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended private schools throughout her life. During the socially turbulent time of the 1970s, she became a feminist, a lesbian, and a Quaker. A founding member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Wendy coauthored and edited many versions of the women’s health and sexuality classic Our Bodies, Ourselves from 1973 to 2011. In seminary at Harvard Divinity School in the ’80s, she began to read works of women of color as “devotional reading,” to remedy her previous exclusive exposure to white and mostly male authors. She served for nearly a decade in campus ministry in the Boston area. In her fifties, she began reckon with her own white skin and the benefits that came to her through being white. In 2003, she earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She lives in Cambridge, MA, with Polly Attwood, her spouse of forty-one years. She is grateful to Mary Norman for partnering with her to create this book.