The Wreck

Description

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 political activism.

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. It’s not until she meets her extended family for the first time that she realizes she is named after—and looks eerily like—her father’s niece, who was killed in a car wreck along with her father’s beloved mother, his only sister, and—as she soon discovers—his first wife.
 
In this compelling memoir, Jackson retraces her and her family’s past and finds a single common thread: the medical malpractice and neglect whose effects have caused needless loss and suffering in her family. It’s as she steps back further that she realizes this single thread touches every single Black family in America, turning this deeply personal memoir into a political call to action. Jackson offers an eye-opening look at how administrative procedures and political maneuvers that seem far from our everyday lives dictate life-or-death consequences for individuals, highlighting this as a piece of American history we still have the chance to course correct.
 Cassandra Jackson is a writer and professor of English at the College of New Jersey, where she teaches classes about African American literature and visual culture. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Emory University. She is a co-author of The Toni Morrison Book Club (2020), a genre-bending group memoir, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was selected as a Best Book of 2020 by Library Journal. She has also published two books on race in U.S. literature and art, and written about contemporary racial issues in personal essays published in HuffPost and The Washington Post. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.
 US