I really really wanted to enjoy I’m Down: A Memoir – US link
“This buoyant memoir is rich in detail but never feels over embellished…I’m Down manages to be light and triumphant because of the hilarious child-goggles Wolff wears while spinning her tales.”
– ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
… and loads of others…
But it just didn’t do it for me. Former model and now screenwriter Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Seattle with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black.
‘He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol – telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried’
– writes Wolff
And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter down. Unfortunately, Mishna didn’t quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. She was shy, uncool, and painfully white. And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too ‘black’ to fit in with her white classmates. “I’m Down” is a memoir that has every ingredient for awesomeness but fails. It seems like a great longer magazine piece but there is not enough there for a book. Let alone enough to examine issue of what it means to be black or white in America as the publishers optimistically have it.
Read the précis, and author interviews and you will already have the meat of the book. All you get by buying I’m Down: A Memoir – US link
Stuart Austin 