Pearl Cleage kept a journal long before her first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Writing journal entries helped her clarify her thoughts, and she recorded everything from her exuberant reactions to movies and books to her growing feminist awareness and her relentless examination of her own sense of purpose.
Cleage returned to her journals when her adult daughter suggested she burn them, arguing that they were too emotional to be reliable and her tumultuous life and accomplishments were already public. Cleage had worked with Atlanta's first African-American mayor as communications director, written a popular column and had been the wife of a prominent local figure before divorcing and finding eventual literary success. But in the entries, Cleage was confronted with her younger self: unprepared for her life and fearful enough of claiming it that she regularly reminded herself to "be very bold." The journals--selections from which became Things I Should Have Told My Daughter--reveal her struggle to reconcile her public profile with her growing feminism and her private yearning for personal and artistic freedom.
Cleage offers no apologies. Her affairs with married men, her marijuana use and her accomplishments are all present, unedited and unvarnished, without the editorial gloss of hindsight or rationalizing context. The result can occasionally be confusing but provides a powerful emotional immediacy and a full portrait of a woman increasingly unafraid of her ambitions, willing to expose her less admirable side along with her achievements and determined to present the full truth of an evolving self. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer