Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me SIGNED FIRST EDITION
New York: Ballantine Books, 2024.
First Edition. Hardcover. Signed by Glory Edim in ink to page specially bound in by the publisher. First Edition with full number line indicating First Printing. 8 1/2" X 5 3/4". xvii, 265pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Bound in orange paper over boards with spine backed in purple and lettered in gilt. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is firm and sound. A very presentable signed first edition.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
An inspiring memoir of family, community, and resilience, and an ode to the power of books to help us understand ourselves, from the renowned founder of Well-Read Black Girl.
“A beautiful portrait of a full life that has been buoyed by an expansive and ever-growing love for words and for language.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”—Toni Morrison, Beloved
For Glory Edim, that “friend of my mind” is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, eventually reaching a community of half a million readers. But her own love of books stretches far back.
Edim’s father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, marking the beginning of a series of traumatic changes and losses for her family. What became an escape, a safe space, and a second home for her and her brother was their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older she discovered authors and ideas that she wasn’t being taught about in class. Reading wherever and whenever she could, be it in her dorm room or when traveling by subway or plane, she found the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni, through children’s poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou, through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison, while attending Morrison’s alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde, on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others taught her how to value herself by helping her to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, and to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their stories.
Gather Me is a glowing testament to how the power of representation in literature can gather the disparate parts that make us who we are and assemble them into a portrait of discovery.(Publisher). Very good + / Very good +. Item #16121
ISBN: 9780525619796
Price: $25.00