The Wreck: A Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother
Cassandra Jackson
May 2023 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Karen Murray
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10 hr 23 min
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NPR's Books We Love 2023
Equal parts investigative and deeply introspective,
The Wreck is a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into renewal.
There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn’t know, and it’s evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. Through awkward encounters with family, she comes to realize that she is named after her father's niece, and looks eerily like the child’s mother, both of whom were killed in a car wreck along with her father's beloved mother, and—as she soon discovers—his first wife. Cassandra learns to keep silent about the wreck, but soon learns there is no way to outpace the claw-like grip of her family’s past trauma.
In this luminous memoir, Jackson attempts to unearth her lost family, while also creating a new one--only to discover little progress separates the past from the present. As she moves back and forth between her girlhood and her journey to motherhood, Jackson reveals the chilling parallels between the harrowing inhumanity of Jim Crow medical care and the toxic discrimination that undergirds healthcare in the United States today. But as she traces the cascading effects of loss punctuated by racism, she also discovers a powerful legacy of fearless love and furious perseverance that she hopes to extend to a new generation.
Lyrical, urgent, and wise, this is an unforgettable story of reclaiming the past to reclaim ourselves.
Equal parts investigative and deeply introspective,
The Wreck is a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into renewal.
There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn’t know, and it’s evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. Through awkward encounters with family, she comes to realize that she is named after her father's niece, and looks eerily like the child’s mother, both of whom were killed in a car wreck along with her father's beloved mother, and—as she soon discovers—his first wife. Cassandra learns to keep silent about the wreck, but soon learns there is no way to outpace the claw-like grip of her family’s past trauma.
In this luminous memoir, Jackson attempts to unearth her lost family, while also creating a new one--only to discover little progress separates the past from the present. As she moves back and forth between her girlhood and her journey to motherhood, Jackson reveals the chilling parallels between the harrowing inhumanity of Jim Crow medical care and the toxic discrimination that undergirds healthcare in the United States today. But as she traces the cascading effects of loss punctuated by racism, she also discovers a powerful legacy of fearless love and furious perseverance that she hopes to extend to a new generation.
Lyrical, urgent, and wise, this is an unforgettable story of reclaiming the past to reclaim ourselves.
About the author
Cassandra Jackson is a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, where she teaches classes about African American literature and visual culture. She is a co-author of The Toni Morrison Book Club (2020), and has also published two books on race in U.S. literature and art, and she has written about racial oppression in everyday life in HuffPost and The Washington Post. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.
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