THE LOVE YOU SAVE

Journalist and human rights activist Taylor serves up a sometimes brutal, sometimes tender coming-of-age story.

In 1971, writes the author, her mother relocated their family from Chicago to East St. Louis, where, a few weeks later, her name “landed at the top of the waiting list for a new public housing project.” There and elsewhere, horrors awaited: Taylor’s older brother was beaten nearly to death, her father was killed, and she was raped—all terrible events the author relates with a certain matter-of-factness, as if as natural as a heat wave: “They’d found a man dead in his house, hunched over an air conditioner that was out of coolant and blowing hot air. The city morgue was at capacity, and they were running out of places to put all the bodies.” Moving to a suburb hardly helped, though it was refreshing not to walk along rows of abandoned houses and dirty street corners. Her mother’s one rule was not to embarrass her in front of the White neighbors, her attitude being that living among them was to be seen “not as an auger of imminent social change but rather an indication of our individual morality and earnestness.” Moving back and forth between family members’ households after attempting suicide, Taylor grew into a reader and excellent student. She was also unfailingly tough; in one case, she held her own in a fight with a taunting middle school classmate who “had fists like Leon Spinks.” Though aspirational, Taylor doesn’t buy the line that hard work always leads to success, not when “a stray bullet after a school dance could change everything.” Still, her well-told story, born of tenacity and intelligence alike, ends in success of a hard-won kind—for, as she concludes, “Grief…is love with nowhere to go.”

An affecting memoir of overcoming adversity when every deck is stacked against you.