Zami

This book is so expansive, Audre Lorde invented a whole new genre for it. She terms it “biomythography,” bringing together autobiography, mythology, fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing to tell her story of queer life.

I fell in love with Zami in college back in the day and have been re-reading it ever since. From her childhood in 1930s and 40s Harlem to her coming out as the self-proclaimed fat black lesbian “warrior poet,” who would come to shape black feminism in the late 20th century and beyond, Zami charts the life, loves, and transformative ideas of one… show more.

Known primarily for her poems and essays, Audre Lorde’s long-form works didn’t attract my attention until I was nearly 30. Zami intrigued me because Lorde called the book a “biomythography”—a mix of biography, history, and myth. The result is a hypnotic mosaic about the lives of women, many of them Black and/or lesbians, who face down hostile political realities, yet often create space to love and support one another.

There is an intimacy to Lorde’s writing, and it doesn’t hesitate to turn sensual. While reading Zami, I realized how underexposed I was to sapphic love stories. I considered myself… show more.

This stunning memoir by the poet Audre Lorde chronicles her childhood in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s, the daughter of black West Indian immigrants, and her young adulthood. I was intrigued to learn about Lorde’s life as an out lesbian in the 1950s, curious to know what that life was like in the generation before mine. So little about the life of gay forbears has been available, creating an acute longing in me to know more. Zami’s narrative weaves through the women in Lorde’s life: her mother, sisters, high school friends, and many lovers, creating a web of… show more.

Audre Lorde writes about her young intersectional life—Black, poor, lesbian—by combining memoir with history and myth. Lorde shares how, from childhood in the 1940s through her post-college years, she lacked a language to describe her experiences with racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. How could she explain to a White friend that she needed a dangerous, illegal abortion—obtained the day before she turned 18—because Black babies were not regarded by White parents as adoptable? What words could she use to tell her White gay friends that even though they are oppressed, they will never understand the oppression of racism? What… show more.