Book Club - High Cotton - 7pm Munich, 10am Pacific

In the Memoir Mentors Book Club, we read memoirs with a memoirist's eye, looking for things that we could use in our writing or things we want to avoid.

We will also have an opportunity to interview the author in a Q&A session on July 7. Sign up here:
https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/memoir-mentors/events/285722312/

High Cotton by Kristie Robin Johnson

Kristie Robin Johnson has lived nearly her whole life in small town Georgia, as did five generations of African American women before her beginning with a slave, her oldest known ancestor. In HIGH COTTON, Johnson explores the social and economic consequences of her lineage, drawing on pivotal moments from her own experience to illuminate the lived reality of a daughter of the Deep South. Johnson unapologetically describes a life that falls below the standards of black respectability, that of an unmarried young mother, an addict’s daughter, a college dropout, welfare recipient, and willful sinner. The voice in HIGH COTTON is a cry from within the masses. Johnson stretches out long brown fingers as far as they will reach to barely skim the first, crucial rung of the ladder to success, that so-called American dream. She exposes the soft underbelly of black girl magic, celebrating black life in all its glorious vulnerability. The essays in HIGH COTTON contain all the complication of a post–civil rights era, post–women’s liberation, pre-millennial black woman living in the modern South, conjuring universal truths every reader will recognize.

Questions we'll discuss:

• This is the first book of essays that we have reviewed. What are your thoughts on the format?
• Did anything about this book change your thoughts about essays or essay collections? Are you interested in reading more of these or writing one yourself?
• Did the author use different styles of essays throughout the book (braided, standard, hermit crab, etc)?
• What was your favorite essay and why?
• What tools does the author use to keep you reading without a standard plot to pull you through?
• Do we get to know the author as well as we might if this were a traditional memoir rather than a collection of essays? What about other characters?
• The author writes about her mother's struggles with drug addiction. What are your thoughts on how much she shared about this? Do you feel that she would have been so candid if her mother were still living?
• Do you feel that there should have been trigger warnings for any of the essays? Are you considering adding them to your own writing? Do you have any examples of trigger warnings that were effective/well-stated?
• Does the order of the essays feel important? Would you have ordered them differently?
• Do any characters change or grow by the end of the story? Do they come to view the world and their relationship to it differently?
• Share your favorite quote(s) and why you felt it was noteworthy.
• Would you be compelled to keep reading if this were not a book club assignment?
• Were there any surprises? Were they effective?
• Was the point of view and character voice consistent?
• What were the major strengths and weaknesses of the book?
• Do you find the narrator(s) and other characters likeable? Believable?
  Of all the people described in the book, who did you most relate to or empathize with, and why?
• Were there any inconsistencies that bothered you?
• How honest do you think the author was being?
• What gaps do you wish the author had filled in? Were there points where you thought he shared too much?
• Is there anything about this book that you want to emulate in your own writing?
• Is there anything that you want to avoid in your own writing?
• What questions would you like to ask the author in our Q&A session?

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Book club Whatsapp group:
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