This inner sense of home stems from the innate child in all of us yearning for security and safety from the unpredictable outside world.Īngelou spends the bulk of the work unraveling her maternal relationships-especially her unconventional relationship with her mother. Everyone “carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin” (6). Despite constant movement, Angelou believes that one never truly leaves home.
She moved around often, having lived in San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Cairo, and West Africa. Louis, Missouri but raised in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou writes that she has “thousands of daughters” regardless of race, religion, sexuality, etc. She tells the reader, “You will find in this book accounts of growing up, unexpected emergencies, a few poems, some light stories to make you laugh and some to make you meditate” (5). Here is my offering to you."-from Letter to My DaughterFrom the Hardcover edition.In the Prologue, Angelou dedicates her letter to the daughter she never birthed but whom she sees in everyone. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all.
You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share."I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice-Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family. For a world of devoted readers, a much-awaited new volume of absorbing stories and inspirational wisdom from one of our best-loved writers.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning.
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