High Yella

A Modern Family Memoir

De: Steve Majors

Narrado por: Terrence Kidd

They called him "pale faced or mixed race" or "light, bright, almost White". But most of the time his family called him "high yella". Steve Majors was the White-passing youngest son of an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately needed to return home to truly find himself and help his two adopted Black daughters find their own place in the world.

In his remarkable and moving memoir, Majors gathers the shards of a broken past to piece together a portrait of a man on an extraordinary journey toward Blackness, queerness, and parenthood. High Yella delivers its hard-won lessons on love, life, and family with exceptional grace.

©2021 Steve Majors (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

a deep inquiry into identity and...

...the question of "What is "family?"

The book alternates between present and past--thank god, because the past is so god awful that had he written this in a linear timeline, I'm not sure I would have made it though. What's happening in the present relates to something in the past, so there you have the back and forth.

But a couple things that set this one apart from many is that the author is pretty unflinching when it comes to his own faults as well as his deft handling of ambiguity (and so much was/is/and continues to be for the author), the things in life that we'll never know the answers to, or things that are just too deep rooted to every really figure out and how you can only keep trying to better yourself. I also found how he handled the fracturing of his family (siblings in particular) in the book interesting--both how he wrote it, and how the family handled it.

I read a ton of memoirs, and I'd highly recommend this one. It's quite the story,