Ordinary Light

Description

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America.

“Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement…. Evocative … luminous.” —The Washington Post

In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Denver Post

“Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement…. Evocative … luminous.” —The Washington Post

“Honest, unflinching . . . an inspiring model for seeking the light in an ‘ordinary’ life—ask the tough questions, look in the hidden corners, allow yourself to understand and never stop searching for faith.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Remarkable. . . . In a passage of agonizing beauty, Smith notes how far she travelled from the religion that had infused her childhood. The tension is [in] the division between Smith’s reflective self and the energy that goes into actively living one’s life. The Smith of Ordinary Light is our Emerson—the Emerson of ‘Self-Reliance.’ In her world, possibility is the key.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker

“Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement. . . . Evocative . . . luminous.” —The Washington Post

“A subtle, elegant meditation that reveals the profound in the quotidian. . . . Exquisitely beautiful.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Transcendent. . . . Lovely, languid, and painful.” —Slate

“Smith writes as a daughter who has lost her mother and is thinking of her own daughter. . . . She offers her painstaking reflections on what went into the making of her.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Ordinary Light shines bright not because of extraordinary events that occurred in Smith’s life but because of the warm glow the memoir casts on the simple everyday life of a young girl yearning to do great things. . . . Smith’s spare yet beautiful prose transforms her story into a shining example of how one person’s shared memories can brighten everyone’s world.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[A] forceful memoir. . . . Rendered indelibly.” —The New Yorker

“A riveting read. . . . Smith writes about her childhood with humor and acute insight.” —Terre Roche, O, The Oprah Magazine

“[Smith’s] self-scrutiny, her empathy, and her lifelong quest to figure things out—in particular our bedeviling national aches, religion and race—make for an indelible self-portrait: moving, utterly clear and compulsively readable.” —Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

“A lyrical reminiscence. . . . The memoir overflows with memorable stories.” —Pittsburgh Tribune Review

“Both precise and transcendent . . . [Smith’s] revelations about identity, religion, and family feel as momentous as anything Barack Obama once put between covers.” —Vulture

“A powerful meditation on being a daughter and, by the end, on being a mother, too.” —The Guardian

“[Smith’s] quiet, questioning memoir is an act of recovery and devotion.” —Newsday

“Stunning. . . . A lyrical, evocative and poignant memoir that is the best of that genre.” —Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

“Smith unsurprisingly reveals tremendous grace and eloquence through her honest, unyielding consideration of the past.” —Time Out NY

“Deeply engaging and brilliantly written.” —Elaine Pagels, author of Beyond Belief

“Small and big moments are observed in elegant prose and in epiphanies that seem both surprising and inevitable.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Poetic. Each sentence is beautiful in its simplicity and readability, artistic in its craft, and deep with its insight and wisdom.” —Washington Missourian

“So emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm parental hug.” —BookPage

“Big and significant because it reminds us that the everyday is where we experience our common struggles.” —Jamaica Kincaid, author of See Now Then

“Ordinary Light is no ordinary book. . . . Smith can now claim a place among the best writers of prose.” —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their AccentsTRACY K. SMITH is the United States Poet Laureate. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, including Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary Light, a hauntingly poignant memoir and the first work of prose by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

1. How does the prologue of this memoir establish the themes of the book, including Tracy’s relationship with her parents and siblings and the tragedy that will come to shape her adulthood? 

2. How is the family’s grief over her mother Kathleen’s death experienced, both individually and collectively? And how did you feel, reading these sections, about such events as experienced in your own family? 

3. How did Tracy, when she was a little girl and young adult, use books as a means to forge bonds with her parents, especially with her father when he was away from home?

4. Tracy’s parents had very different “belief” systems: her father’s was rooted in science, her mother’s in religion and the tenets of Christianity. How did these attitudes both in and of themselves, and in how they differed from one another, foster curiosity in Tracy from a young age?

5. How did her parents’ respective jobs—her father’s as an engineer and her mother’s as a teacher—also shape Tracy’s understanding of their impact on the world outside of their home? And how did these non-parental identities affect Tracy’s own upbringing?  

6. How does the adult Tracy K. Smith who is writing this memoir now acknowledge the limits of her own understanding of her experiences as a child and teenager? How does this retrospective telling affect your own reactions to how she shares these memories in Ordinary Light?

7. Tracy says of her mother that “beside her, I felt what the presence of beauty makes a person feel” (18). How might you imagine that Tracy has channeled her mother’s “presence of beauty” into her own art and life? 

8. Why did Tracy’s mother choose to make her daughter’s first Halloween costume (in the chapter “Spirits and Demons”) resemble a Ku Klux Klan robe? How might this reflect the kind of unspoken ideas and beliefs that Tracy’s mother held throughout her life and that Tracy slowly, in the course of this book, becomes aware of?

9. When Tracy goes to Leroy, Alabama, to visit her grandmother, whom everyone refers to as “Mother,” during the summer after first grade, she leaves with a very different sense of her family’s roots from that ofwhen she arrived. How does this experience shape her understanding of what it means to be black in America? What does her name suggest about Mother’s place in Tracy’s family? 

10. How do Tracy’s aunts and mother unite and disagree when it comes to Mother’s care? What do those interactions illustrate about the bonds between the generations of women in their family, and are there similar bonds in your own family? How does Tracy reflect on those bonds between her mother and herself, and then herself and her own children, going further into the book?

11. Is there a specific moment when Tracy realizes how her race is seen by people outside her family? How prominent does this aspect of her identity become as she grows older, including after she goes to college?

12. What among her family’s routines, traditions, and habits—including favorite meals and foods her mother prepares—stand out in Tracy’s memories about growing up? What impact did those things have on her understanding of what home and family really mean?

13. When the year turns to 1980, Tracy writes the date in her school notebook and recalls how she “looked at the zero, the fresh, round, empty hole of it, and I imagined that every life, lived every day, everywhere, would go into filling up that space . . . [that] my presence would matter . . . not because of who I was but rather that I was” (68). How does this self-awareness of her place and importance in the world develop with time? Does that mind-set come from any of what her family has taught her?

14. Why do you think poetry, among the many kinds of artistic and creative expression in the world that Tracy pursues, including music and dance, speaks so strongly to her? What do the works and ideas of certain poets she loves, such as Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Seamus Heaney, reveal to her about the kind of poet she’d herself ultimately become?

15. Tracy’s romantic experiences as an adolescent and young woman sometimes feel forbidden or taboo to her. How did you interpret these relationships and Tracy’s own attitude toward them? 

16. Would you describe Tracy as more rebellious during any point in her youth and adolescence, owing to her strict upbringing, or are her attitudes typical, in your view, for a teenager? Does she now express guilt or remorse for any of her decisions and actions when she was younger, including when she discovers the truth about her mother’s illness and must come to terms with it?

17. What is unique about Tracy’s relationship with her four siblings? How does she rely on each of them for different needs and on different occasions?

18. What did going to college allow Tracy to realize about herself and who she “really” was, including new possibilities for her independence? What was special about her being at Harvard in particular?

19. Discuss the various facets of Tracy’s relationship with religion and God and how they change as she grows up. How do you think she was affected by her mother’s belief that when she becomes unwell “God would deliver her—not only from the illness but from the fear of whatever it was He had decided to deliver her to” (231)?

20. How does Tracy’s understanding of death change throughout her life? Consider what she thinks when she’s young and her grandfather dies, that “my mother’s world has been touched by death,” and then how her own world is similarly touched later on (206).

21. Discuss the meaning of the kerosene lamp that is recollected toward the end of the book—a lamp through which Tracy describes feeling her mother’s presence as “a column of threat and promise and light” (329). What does this suggest about the meaning of the book’s title, Ordinary Light, and the nature of the memory of her mother? What does Tracy say that writing this book and having her own children have helped her realize about her mother even after she’s passed? 

Prologue: The Miracle

She left us at night. It had felt like night for a long time, the days at once short and ceaselessly long. November-dark. She’d been lifting her hand to signal for relief, a code we’d concocted once it became too much effort for her to speak and too difficult for us to understand her when she did. When it became clear that it was taking everything out of her just to lift the arm, we told her to blink, a movement that, when you’re watching for it, becomes impossibly hard to discern. “Was that a blink?” we’d ask when her eyelids just seemed to ripple or twitch. “Are you blinking, Mom? Was that a blink?” until finally, she’d heave the lids up and let hem thud back down to say, Yes, the pain weighs that much, and I am lying here, pinned beneath it. Do something.
 
Did we recognize the day when it arrived? A day with so much pain, a day when her patience had dissolved and she wanted nothing but to be outside of it. Pain. The word itself doesn’t hurt enough, doesn’t know how to tell us what it stands for. We gave her morphine. Each time she asked for it, we asked her if she was sure, and she found a way to tell us that she was, and so we were sure—weren’t we?—that this was the end, this was when and how she would go.
 
I was grateful for my brother Conrad and his wife, both doctors. None of the rest of us would have known how to administer the drug in such a way as to say what we needed it to say—Take this dose, measured out, controlled, a proven means of temporary relief —rather than what we knew it actually meant. Grateful, and hopeful that the training might stand guard against the fact that the patient was our mother.
 
The nurse who came by each day was a cheerful person who knew not to be cheery. Calm, available, knowing, pleasant. But she stopped short of chipper. She must have been instructed not to bring that kind of feeling into a home that was preparing for death. Not to bring hope. Instead, she brought mild comfort, a commendable gentleness that helped to rebuild something inside us. The nurse cared for our mother the way we sought to care for our mother: with no signs of struggle, no stifled rage at God and the unfair world, no tears. In changing our mother’s bandages and handling her flesh with such competence and ease, the nurse cared for us, too. Once a day for only an hour at a time, she came and eased our load just enough to get us to the next day when we knew she’d come again.
 
I had sat and read the hospice literature one morning at the dining room table. A binder with information about how to care for the dying at home. It said that as death approaches, the body becomes cool to the touch. The limbs lose their warmth as the body concentrates its energy on the essential functions. Some-times when I was alone with my mother, I’d touch her feet and legs, checking to see how cool she had become. I was both frightened and reassured that the literature was correct, as if her body was saying goodbye to the world, preparing itself for a journey— though that’s not it, exactly, for the body goes nowhere, merely shuts down in preparation for being left. I could sense my mother leaving, getting ready for some elsewhere I couldn’t visit, and like the cool hands and feet I’d check for every day, it both crushed and heartened me. Every day, she spoke less, ate less, surrendered a little more of her presence in this world. Every day, she seemed to be more firmly aligned with a place or a state I believed in but couldn’t decipher.
 
When the dark outside was real—not just the dark of approaching winter, and not just the dark of rain, which we’d had for days, too—her dying came on. We recognized it. We circled her bed, though we stopped short of holding hands, perhaps because that gesture would have meant we were holding on, and we were finally ready to let her go. Each of us took a turn saying “I love you” and “Goodbye.” We made our promises. Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
 
It’s the kind of miracle we never let ourselves consider, the miracle of death. She followed that last breath wherever it led and left her body behind in the old four-poster Queen Anne bed, where for the first time in all of our lives it was a body and nothing more. 
 
After it was clear that she was gone, my sister Wanda rose from the floor where she’d been sitting—we’d all gone from standing around her to sitting or huddling there on the rug around the bed; perhaps we had fallen to our knees in unconscious obedience to the largeness that had claimed our mother, the invisible power she had joined—and crawled into bed beside her, nestling next to her under the covers just as we’d all done when we were children. The act struck me then as futile. In those last many weeks, I’d grown used to looking at my mother, changed almost daily, it seemed, by the disease. And every day, I’d fought to find a way to see her as herself, as not so very far from whom she’d always been to me. But now she was something else altogether. Wasn’t it obvious? The body already stiffening, the unnatural, regrettable set to the jaw, as if the spirit had exited through her mouth. Still, Wanda, the first-born, clung to her, crying, eyeing each of us as if to say, She was mine first. Which of you is going to drag me away? It was the type of gesture I’d have expected my father to chastise her for, though of course he didn’t; none of us did. He was just as undone as any of us, though he’d done his best. In the moments after it was clear what had happened, when we found ourselves coming to in the bleak and unreal reality of her death, he’d said to my sisters and me, “You must be brave”—the thing fathers tell children in old wartime movies. I’d tried my best not to judge him as lacking in imagination, for I knew that while what he’d said was patently unoriginal, it was also true. I tried not to judge Wanda, either, but I admit that I took her invitation to even the possibility of struggle as in questionable taste. Perhaps, after a moment, she came to the same view herself, at which point she stood up and agreed to wait upstairs with the rest of us.
 
We all instinctively wanted the strangers who were already on their way to find our mother as presentable in death as she had always been in life, and so Conrad had agreed to stay behind to prepare the body, to change her clothes and the bed linens. He and his wife, Janet, the doctors, doing what nurses do in order to protect the shell, the empty shape, the idea of our mother from even the slightest tinge of scorn or even simply the rote disregard the attendants might have brought to their work. He’d cried doing it. Readying her to be taken away had been his moment of realization, his genuine goodbye.
 
There was a moment when I found myself alone with her in the room. Had I crept back down to steal a last look, or had we all agreed to give one another that much? It’s been twenty years now.  I’ve forgotten so much that I once forbade myself to forget, but I do remember this: snipping five or seven strands of her hair with a pair of nail scissors from her bureau. Just a few short hairs from the nape of her neck. Suddenly, those few strands, things I’d have once thought nothing of brushing off her shoulders or discarding from among the tines of a hairbrush, were consecrated, a host. For a moment, I contemplated eating them, but then they’d be gone and I’d have been left with nothing, so I placed them in a small plastic bag, the kind of bag in which spare threads or extra buttons are provided when you purchase a sweater or coat, and tucked that into the flap of my address book.
 
 
 

US

Additional information

Weight	9 oz
Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.2000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Vintage
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780345804075
ISBN-10	0345804074
Author	Tracy K. Smith
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO022000, BIO007000
Subjects	pulitzer prize winners, memoirs, books for women, celebrity memoirs, feminist books, african american books, black history books, gifts for history buffs, memoir books, memories, addiction books, best seller books for women, black books, uplifting books for women, black history books for adults, Life on Mars, Wade in the Water, tracy k smith, BIO007000, BIO022000, relationships, addiction, alcoholism, biography, Memoir, coming of age, pulitzer prize, feminism, black history, black history month, poetry, non fiction, true stories, biographies, poet