MOM & ME & MOM by Maya Angelou – A Memoir
The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: the relationship with her mother.
Anyone who’s read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings knows Angelou was raised by her paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. In MOM & ME & MOM, Angelou details what brought her mother, Vivian Baxter Johnson, to send her and her older brother away when Vivian’s marriage began to crumble. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told.
“The first decade of the 20th century was not a great time to be born Black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri.” So begins this stunning portrait of Vivian, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger than life presence–a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. Johnson was the first black woman officer in the Merchant Marines, purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, and mother to a literary icon.
In MOM & ME & MOM, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call Lady, revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them: “My mother’s gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.”
Filled with photos from Angelou’s private collection, this heartfelt tribute to motherhood and unconditional love is the work of a lifetime for Angelou. She tackles powerful emotions left untouched through all her earlier writings in a requiem of healing sure to resonate with readers everywhere.
MOM & ME & MOM explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.
“[Angelou’s MOM & ME & MOM is the] latest, and most potent, of her serial autobiographies…[A] tough-minded, tenderhearted addition to Angelou’s spectacular canon.” —Elle Magazine
“In this loving recollection of a complicated relationship, Angelou for the first time details the mother-daughter journey to reconciliation and unwavering connection and support… Angelou vividly portrays a spirited woman… [A] remarkable and deeply revealing chronicle of love and healing.”—Booklist
“Written with her customary eloquence, Angelou’s latest focuses on her relationship with her mother, the fierce, beautiful, charismatic, and determined Vivian Baxter…The book follows in the episodic style of Angelou’s earlier volumes of autobiography, pulling the reader along effortlessly. The lessons and the love presented here will speak to those trying to make their way in the world.” —Publishers Weekly
“True to her style, the writing cuts to the chase with compression and simplicity, and there in the background is a calypso smoothness, flurries and showers of musicality between the moments of wickedness…A tightly strung, finely tuned memoir about life with her mother.” —Kirkus Reviews
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director Maya Angelou was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and then moved to San Francisco. In addition to her groundbreaking autobiographies, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she has also written two cookbooks, five poetry collections, including I Shall Not Be Moved, three books of essays, including Letter to My Daughter, and six long-form poems, including “Mother” and “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton.
