4.5/5 Reading Sounds: I Miss You by, Beyoncé
Last night I decided to take a bath. I turned on the hot water, grabbed the bath salts, and cracked open What We Lose by, Zinzi Clemmons. Three and a half hours later, dried off and in bed, I finished the last page, and immediately watched every single YouTube video I could find with Clemmons’ brilliant voice in it. When I read the plot summary I thought this book was going to be about race, and a large portion of the book was definitely about race. However, I felt that at its core, this was a book about death, loss, and grief. This debut novel published in 2018 follows Thandi, a girl grappling with her identity in the wake of losing her mother to cancer. Thandi’s father is Black African American, and her mother is white South African. Thandi’s experience as a woman of mixed-race heritage plays a huge role in this story. This leads to many passages revolving around her feelings of displacement in America as well as South Africa. One of my favorite parts of the book was when she begins to graph death. She plots out the intensity of her emotions over a period of time. As she learns about her mothers diagnosis, the data trends upwards, and when her mother passes away, it spirals into an infinitely small and unobservable amount. She discusses asymptotes - in geometry, a straight line that approaches but never meets a curve - as they relate to her emotions during this period. After her mother’s death, she will never be the same. Her emotions might spiral around herself. A casual observer might say they are one. However, they are only ever infinitely approaching each other, never quite meeting the same way they did before. She will never be the same after her mother’s death. At several points in the story, I started to believe that Thandi was acting on self-destructive tendencies that were doing her more harm than good. By the end of the book, although I still feel that she was doing plenty of harm to herself, I realized that in the wake of something as traumatic as what she has gone through, it is still very powerful to read about a character who is wiling to go to the lengths that she has in order to feel something again, to take what she wants, and go from there rather than wallow in stagnant self-pity. Although this was a very sad book, I do think that it ended on a relatively hopeful note. This was a poignant story that will sit with me for a long time, and I am excited to dive into another book by Zinzi Clemmons when I get the chance.