My village book club chose Letter To My Daughter (2008) by Maya Angelou and it’s handy that it’s 175 pages – indeed, because it is split into 28 short chapters, each of which gets a numbered page announcing it, it’s probably nearer 100 pages of actual text. And I raced through it in about an hour, because it is very easy to consume.
What is Letter To My Daughter? Well, first off, it isn’t a letter to Angelou’s daughter – she doesn’t have one. As she explains in a quick preface, ‘I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.’
And then, to be frank, the book is a miscellany of stray thoughts, anecdotes, poetry and life lessons. It is called a collection of essays, but that is a little generous. Some are profound, some are incidental, and many hover somewhere the two. She shares her experience of hiding a pregnancy, and the time she was almost murdered by an abusive boyfriend. She writes about faux pas that she committed in social settings, and an amusing case of mistaken identity. There is plenty that is deeply honest, and plenty that you could comfortably say to a stranger at a bus stop.
Along the way are some excellent short pieces. This moemnt in ‘In the Valley of Humility’ summed up a marriage with elegance and understated eloquence:
I was married to Paul DuFeu, a master builder, a writer, and a popular cartoonist in England. Within two days of our meeting we knew we were in love together and had to be in life together.
For ten years we surprised, amused, angered, and supported each other. Unexpectedly a storm cloud roared into that sunny climate of love. My queries annoyed him, my husband admitted that he had grown weary of monogamy and needed more provocation in his life.
We separated just as I was to begin a national lecture tour. Since my husband was a builder and his business was based in northern California, I decided to make him a gift of San Francisco and the bridges and the hills, and the gourmet restaurants and the beautiful bay view.
Divorce like every other rite of passage introduces new landscapes, new rhythms, new faces and places, and sometimes races.
There are plenty of gems in Letter To My Daughter, but I can’t help concluding that this is a book that could only be published by a well-respected, beloved author who has earned it over a career. On its own merits, it is enjoyable but would probably have to work rather harder to be published without a reputation. It is too slight, too scattergun.
And it surely shouldn’t have been my first book by Maya Angelou, but it was. I enjoyed it, but more as a tribute to an author I should know better, whose experience and wisdom seep through the pages – but who undoubtedly wrote more important, better things elsewhere.