All The Things: Our August Book!
Perhaps even the ghosts that haunt can be redeemed.
A quick note: An All The Things summer gift will be on the way to your mailbox next month! 📬 If you’ve already filled out the ATT mailing address form and there are no updates to the info, you’re all set. If you forgot to include your address when you subscribed to ATT, or if you recently moved, please share via the link at the bottom of this email. I mail gifts your way every couple months so it’ll be updated/saved for next time! :)
It’s been a fun secret to keep, but it’s officially time to spill the beans.
In Thursday Things, on Instagram Stories, in the summer book recommendation list . . . this one has made the rounds right here in our small corner of the internet, but I’m real, real happy to finally tell you that the one and only Lisa-Jo Baker is joining us next month.
Tell Me the Dream Again was our first memoir to read and discuss together in All The Things, and I love that these two stories stretching through generations will be back-to-back. One, a love letter to her mother. The other, a turbulent redeeming of her father’s family tree.
They’re strikingly different and yet stunningly similar in the shocking way that memoirs can be, hope and beauty woven into the most tender of stories.
My review:
Brutally honest and beautifully written, this exquisite memoir will stay with you long after the final page is turned. After all, “It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping” is an invitation to ask is anything, really, truly the final page? Between her tender admissions and confessions, her captivating descriptions that transport from one place to another, and the weaving together of both hope and heartbreak, Baker offers a book that seems to say: Perhaps even the ghosts that haunt can be redeemed.
Our August Book: It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping by Lisa-Jo Baker
📒 Book description:
An honest and lyrical coming-of-age memoir of growing up in South Africa at the height of apartheid, and an invitation to confront our inherited traumas and prejudices so that we may heal the sins of our fathers—from the bestselling author of Never Unfriended.
Lisa-Jo Baker knows how burdened we can feel by the weight of the past. Born white in the heart of Zululand during the height of apartheid, her longing to write a new future for her children set her on a journey to understand how she fit into a story of violence and faith, history and race. Before marriage and motherhood, she came to the United States to study to become a human rights advocate. When she naively walked right into America’s own turbulent racial landscape, she experienced the kind of painful awakening that is both individual and universal, personal and communal. Yet years would go by before she traced this American trauma back to her own South African past.
Baker was a teenager when her mother died of cancer, leaving her with her father. Though they shared a language of faith and justice, she often feared him, unaware that his fierce temper had deep roots in a family’s and a nation’s pain. Decades later, old wounds reopen when she finds herself spiraling into a terrifying version of her father, screaming herself hoarse at her son. Only then does Baker realize that to go forward—to refuse to repeat the sins of our fathers—we must first go back.
Stretching from South Africa’s Outback to Washington, D.C., It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping invites readers to look at their inherited hurts and prejudices. It’s also a hope-filled guide for all who feel lost in life, worried they’re too off-course to make the necessary corrections. Baker assures you, it’s never too late to be free.
📚 Book links:
Here are several quick links for ordering, but don’t forget to check your library or local bookstore!
P.s. I have both the ebook and the hardcover, but will likely end up purchasing the audiobook too just so I can hear it in LJ’s voice (there are a number of words in Afrikaans + isiZulu).
Amazon hardcover (currently 23% off)
Bookshop.org (affiliate link)
📖 Suggested reading schedule:
Of course, read/listen as it works for you! I know a few of y’all prefer to read the entire book the week before the call, while others space it out, reading a little at a time over the course of a month.
Our August Author Chat with Lisa-Jo will be at the end of the month, giving as much time as possible for books to ship + for everyone to read without feeling rushed.