Ordinary Light: A Memoir

Written by Tracy K. Smith

Narrated by Tracy K. Smith

Positioning Statement From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Description Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and "ecstatic possibility," and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home. Key Selling Points - ACCLAIM: The narrative debut of a critics' darling whose name is instantly recognizable among reviewers. Parts of this memoir expand, in prose, upon the elegy for Smith's father that was the centerpiece of her most recent, Pulitzer-winning collection, Life on Mars, which was also a New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a New York TimesNotable Book of 2011, and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. - AUTHOR: Smith is a brilliant and charismatic presence who has lectured widely across the U.S. Her frankness about herself and her family in Ordinary Light will attract reader engagement, book-group discussion, and the review community. - MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY: The memoir, framed by the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, is perfect for Mother's Day. - EVOCATIVE PROSE: Smith conjures her home and family with vivid, visceral imagery and a richly textured sense of place in a wholly accessible voice. She skillfully combines a child's and teenager's perceptions with adult retrospection, giving Ordinary Light the feel of a classic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490677323

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith, guest editor, served as United States Poet Laureate from 2017–2019 and is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including, most recently, Wade in the Water and Life on Mars, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2012. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015. Educated at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, she is the Roger S. Berlind ‘52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Reviews for Ordinary Light

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A well written memoir by a young Black woman whose central glue is her relationship with her mother until her untimely death. This book transcends race and gender and settles on interpersonal relationships with family members and acquaintances that have made her the woman she is today. It is not melodramatic or depressing but more of a celebration of the struggles and good times that many families have to go through. The book is well worth reading and worthy of all the acclaim it has recieved

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Ordinary Light" by Tracy K. Smith, was an interesting memoir by a fine American poet. Smith was our U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. The only drawback to the book for me was personal, it was all the god talk, but I knew to expect it from her poetry and hearing her speak. Myself, I’m still mourning the end of her poetry podcast, The Slowdown, which shut down at the end of October of 2020. Monday through Friday she would choose a poem to read and tell how she related to it. I loved the sound and the enthusiasm in her voice during those memorable five-minute poetry pieces. On my darkest days, those five minutes were a bright little break from my internal bleakness. I would sometimes save them up for the rough times. She starts the book with herself and her siblings, there are five of them gathered around her mother’s deathbed. They are all attempting to ease their mother’s pain as she slips away. I found myself very moved when she wrote of her mother’s suffering and cancer. It reached even deeper into my heart when she mentioned their in-home hospice care.I found the following line fascinating as she relates to sexual relations. “I started to write a play in which a woman sitting up naked in her bed was having a version of this conversation with herself, describing what it felt like to lie down under the weight of her lover and feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed.” I simply love that last phrase, “feel the rest of the world slide off the edge of the bed.”Another time she writes about the years when her mother so missed her dad. He was away working Monday through Friday, staying at his Silicon Valley apartment, while the rest of the family continued to live in Fairfield. “Maybe that longing had planted the first seed of the cancer. If not that, then surely, he’d done something else. He was a man, after all; wasn’t that crime enough?” The last paragraph of the book is a sweet remembrance from Tracy’s childhood, when she was intertwined with her mother while lying on the couch. “Mommy?” “Yes, Tracy?” she’ll ask, calmly, once I have punctured her sleep with my need to hear her voice, to feel it rise through her and hum against my ear. “Oh, nothing.” I’ll answer. “Nothing.”It was wonderful when Tracy did write about her writing and her poetry, but there wasn’t as much as I had hoped for in the book. Of poetry she wrote at one point, “I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by—the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.” It was a curious book. It tends to be centered around her being a daughter, a granddaughter, and in the end, a mother to her daughter. Though I’m sure that I missed out on much of what she wrote, because I am none of those things, I found the book very direct and thoughtful.

[dooney-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of Smith’s gifts seems to be in shingin light on how the ordinary is, in and of itself, quite extraordinary.

[bibliofemmes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully and completely relate-able as we are all daughters. Language and text were so elegant. Poignant story of a young girl's coming of age, her place in the family, her relationship to her mother and in the world.

[mahallett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

She says this book is about her relationship with her mom but I found this the least interesting part. Her growing up was more interesting. I did find it interesting how few jobs she had. She seemed to be sitting around a lot. Lucky girl!

[finefineleonine · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Smith writes a memoir as a poet would--holding up moments, and fragments, to the light so as to illuminate their mundane brilliance. It's a beautiful book that is somehow matter-of-fact and revelatory all at once.