Notes from August's Not Fiction Book Discussion

In an interesting follow-up to our July discussion of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, one of our discussion members brought in a newspaper article about the erosion and loss of top soil caused by the flooding in the Midwest this summer. The article notes that, just as with the Dust Bowl, farmers and environmentalists disagree about what to do with erosion-prone land: farm it in hopes of good yields and high prices to make up for crops lost in the floods, or plant it with native grasses, ground cover, and trees to prevent further erosion. We agreed that the Dust Bowl offered a very clear lesson in the best way to proceed.


A central topic of our discussion of One Drop by Bliss Broyard was whether Anatole and Sandy Broyard should have concealed Anatole's identity as a person of mixed race from his children until his death. All of us felt that he should have shared this information earlier in their lives, yet we did question whether we have a right to know everything about our families and what information ought to be shared and what kept private. This question begs another about Anatole Broyard: To what extent were his decisions regarding his identity related to his desire to preserve his own self-image, and to what extent were they the result of his concern for his family? We agreed that Bliss Broyard does a remarkable job of portraying her father's complex motivations, motivations that he may not have been entirely aware of himself, and that she does so in a manner that is both candid and forgiving. Bliss Broyard is also honest about her own motivations in researching her father's family history: "I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, and since I was too young to feel I'd earned my own complications, I'd happily take some from my father."

An important theme of Bliss Broyard's book is the authenticity of one's identity. In one important scene, Bliss Broyard takes a personality test four different times, only to have it reveal each time that she is an imposter, that, as the administrator tells her, she is "not living in a way that's true to who you are." In a later scene, Bliss imagines the thoughts that must have gone through her father's mind when he was faced with a decision about which race/ethnicity box to check on his application for a social security card. She tells us that "the occasion has become the repository for all my imaginings about the different moments over the years when he had to make a calculation about how to describe his race." We discussed whether Anatole Broyard was an imposter, and decided that to some degree he was. One group member suggested that Anatole was unable to complete his novel because he would not follow the advice to "write what you know." Another member pointed out the anger that some of his relatives felt about his insistence that race was not important to his identity--because he looked white, he could choose to pass and claim it was not as important to him as it actually was. However, we decided that Bliss Broyard has come to an understanding of both herself and her father that offers all of us a useful way of thinking about race and identity in the United States today: "From my own father, I inherited a legacy that connected me to the worst and best American traditions: from the racial oppression spawned by slavery to the opportunities created through becoming self-made. Recognizing my forebears' place in the continuum of history has made me appreciate my own responsibilities as a citizen--of my community, my country, and the world--in a way that simply paying my taxes or casting a vote never did. . . . I may never be able to answer the question What am I? yet the fault lies not in me but with the question itself."

How important do you believe being "true to who you are" is? If you have read One Drop, has it influenced that opinion in any way? We hope you will join our discussion of this multilayered book and the many important questions it raises.