In the Country of Women: A Memoir

By Susan Straight

One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

“Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self–proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close–knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post–slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother–in–law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.

A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.”

“Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned–together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.” ––Los Angeles Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948226233

Susan Straight

Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com. 

Reviews for In the Country of Women

[theloislevel · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I liked the first section of this book, when the author tells the story of all of her forebears, but I got bored when I hit the second part and she started talking about her family and relationship. She seems to think she's a big deal because she's a blond married to a black guy. Yawn.

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'd read Straight's books I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen And Licked Out All The Pots (1992) and Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights (1994) and was always curious about her comfort and familiarity with African American families (she was clearly Caucasian in the book flap). My "aha" came from the cover of her memoir, with its three adorable mixed race girls. In 1979, Straight married Dwayne, her high school boyfriend, and they became the junction not only of their daughters, but for two incredible families with disparate trunks, limbs, branches, and leaves. The best of times were the frequent driveway gatherings of Dwayne's large clan, with the mandatory inclusion of each woman's unique side dish, and Straight's visits with Dwayne and the girls to the Heidi-like mountain village in Switzerland where her mother was born. But this is mostly a story of Riverside, CA, on the wrong side of LA but with welcoming room for every imaginable nationality. The author is frank and honest about her divorce and about her neglectful father, and about her gratitude for the acceptance and love of Dwayne's family, due primarily to Straight's desire for inclusion and their own love for her daughters. Missing and sorely missed: family trees.Quotes: "Some Americans have tried to make slavery a single chapter in the nation's history, a finite number of years that ceases influence at the end of the Civil War. Tell this to the thousands of black women and men killed in carefully planned acts of retribution or for casual sport." "I was trying to explain to someone how we grew up. I was like, wait - what's below humble?"