Life Notes

Life Notes is the first collection devoted exclusively to writings from the journals, diaries, and personal notebooks of contemporary black women. These intensely personal testimonies illuminate the complexities of black women's lives, offering unique reflections about self, family, intimacy, work, politics, life transitions, violation, and recovery.

Featured here are works by such well-known authors as bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid, Rita Dove, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker, as well as by emerging and previously unpublished writers. The contributors are native daughters from three continents and the Caribbean, ranging in age from eight to sixty. "Never in all the years have I encountered as intimate work as Life Notes. Each woman spoke secretly to me and only me, and I appreciated every admission." —Maya Angelou

"Life Notes is a collection of pieces that are intimate and universal, accessible and profound. Let traditional novelists eat their hearts out—for these women have written their hearts out." —Gloria Steinem

"Intimate, impassioned, often heartbreaking. . . . Reading through it is immensely rewarding—like having an hour-long, tell-all phone conversation with a close friend." —Kirkus Reviews

1995 / ISBN 0-393-31206-2 / 432 pages / AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

• Patricia Bell-Scott is co-editor of the best-selling Doublestitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters, which earned the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize. She is also co-founding editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women and teaches at the University of Georgia.
• A selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club