Rare Insight & Heart: Tracy K. Smith's New Memoir, Ordinary Light

At Publisher's Weekly, Craig Morgan Teicher reviews Tracy K. Smith's newest book (officially out today, in fact), a memoir called Ordinary Light (Knopf 2015). "Ordinary Life begins with a harrowing scene at the deathbed of Smith’s mother, who died in 1994. From there it circles back to Smith’s early childhood, tracing her growth not just as a writer, but as someone who must learn the hard lessons of puberty and early adulthood, as well as what it means to be a black woman growing up in suburban California," writes Teicher. More:

Her discovery of poetry is part of this, but the most remarkable moments in this book are the ones in which Smith deals with ordinary trials, which she treats with rare insight and heart.

How long does grief take? Perhaps it takes a lifetime, in which case the real question is, how long does it take to begin? In two other recent grief memoirs (perhaps not coincidentally also by poets, for whom death is a perennial subject), grief hits hard and rapidly turns into writing—The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 2011), by Meghan O’Rourke, and The Light of the World (Grand Central, April), by Elizabeth Alexander. In those books, the loss of a loved one—O’Rourke’s mother and Alexander’s husband—spurs a frenzy of pain, contemplation, and reevaluation. Both are transformative books that take a hard look at how grief plays out in contemporary America.

Smith is after something very different: her mother had been dead for several years when she wrote the first drafts of what would become Ordinary Light, and it was nearly 20 years before she began writing the book in earnest. This is not a chronicle of the shock of loss. Rather, it is a celebration of Smith’s life, lived in the thrall of a powerful, charismatic mother; it’s a chronicle of a big family with five children, and a story of coming of age amid deep and abiding love.

Though it opens with a deathbed scene, Ordinary Light sees Smith’s mother’s final moments as “the kind of miracle we never let ourselves consider, the miracle of death,” which opens the way to memory.

Read the full review at Publisher's Weekly.