The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart

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Or that a particular character behaved in a certain way because of the person upon whom the character was based. Because fiction is always truer than truth. Yet it remains fiction, which is how you get to that deeper truth. It was amusing to me—and as you know, I like to amuse myself— to extend some of their characteristics into fiction, consciously, and to own it. The format also provided a way for me to revisit, consciously, a period in my life that was filled with so many emotions: The construction of the book enabled me to show how freedom emerges out of a teeming cauldron of emotions.

I wanted to show the joys, pleasures, terrors, and discoveries of being on the road to liberation. What were some of the discoveries for you?

Broken-hearted nation

I discovered that you can start out with a love that seems complete. It appears to be exactly what you want and need. When my marriage was working, it was an absolute enchantment. But there were differences in fluidity. For example, my husband was very dedicated to his work life. He could not spend much time, say, relaxing. Just sitting around having his head scratched. And something about that simple, repetitive act gave us both enormous pleasure. I felt that such playful grooming of each other was something people of color shared with all of creation.

That it was a natural state of being that allowed us to reach a certain bliss. So, I learned that each lover is an opportunity for a reeducation and recommitment to what is real and authentic. The more authentic you can be in each relationship, the freer you become. Each lover moves you toward a greater emancipation. My love life has been like that. And I love it. When you cling to what is no longer there, you suffer. I know from personal experience that clinging is painful. And what about the pain that often comes with letting go? With the relinquishing of what people believe to be "true love"?

I think it would be helpful for them to know that suffering is in the world and it is in us. The grief and sadness is natural. The crucial thing is acceptance. Nothing in life is eternal. With life being what it is, when one door closes another one opens. When one love leaves, another is on the way. Instead of collapsing in sorrow, I would suggest that they embrace the idea that life is never over.

Perhaps in this form it is. But I could be on the way to becoming a seashell. Maybe there will be a time in my life when there is no romance or intimacy with another person. But love is always a possibility.

The key is to have it in yourself and for yourself. And the world is full of people who really deserve and want to be loved. How can people transcend preconceived or culturally enforced notions of who and what they should love? For me, it has never been about color or any other external characteristics. I have never had to choose somebody just like me. The quality I look for and one that can help people move beyond their preconceived ideas is a sense of readiness.

After the ending of a relationship, I inevitably come to a place of being ready to love again. As you know, most people are not ready. But there are many who are. And they present themselves to us in as many forms as there are in nature. From your vantage point, what does a ready person look like? Ready people are very helpful and reliable.

They are present with you. They are very forthright and honest about whatever they might be struggling with in life. They offer themselves freely as available to assist, with no strings attached. And that is very attractive. Because it is in that spirit that people can provide the staff of support that we need on the path. And the universe reflects my readiness and joy. His music has the ability to soothe, comfort, and heal. I wish I knew more about his mother. Because my sense is that a lot of his music comes from lullabies and folk songs from her side of the family.

Tina Turner is another artist I listen to who reflects my readiness to love. For me, she is already one. She takes us to places of such pain, degradation, humiliation and then sings us out of that despair. But her music is ultimately about triumph. So, listening to Mozart and Tina makes for an interesting blend. They both get us to the innate joy that resides within us, regardless of heartache. My message for people who have ended relationships and who might be comtemplating killing themselves is to just sit with it.

Breathe in the pain. Let it almost kill you. And then put on some music that you really enjoy and dance. Which will be your next love. Your career thus far has spanned thirty years. With The Color Purple , you became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer prize in fiction. Has the willingness of the world to receive you been a surprise? Well, everything has surprised me. But fundamentally, when people respond to me, they are actually responding to a version of themselves. Now, I will never be one. But there is a part of me that thoroughly appreciates the skill and daring of driving a race car.

Maybe it will fly. When people read my books, I think a similar feeling gets activated. They see what they could be, if only. On the outside these people may not have resembled me at all. But when I opened the gift, I was staring into a mirror. That said, I am surprised I have lived this long. For starters, they were shooting people in Mississippi, quite regularly. Then I had to deal with my own depression about that very fact and all the other difficulties of life. However, having lived this long, I feel such a gratitude and freedom.

If I died this minute, my life has been more than I could have ever imagined. About The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart "These are the stories that came to me to be told after the close of a magical marriage to an extraordinary man that ended in a less-than-magical divorce. Also by Alice Walker. Chicana women are being murdered in Texas. All of us are being attacked because we are women, and no one really cares about us but us.

Let us understand this, and stop expecting the same Patriarchy that is killing us to help save our lives. Refuse the role of victim! Create a new role and identity as fighters for Our Life. How easy it will be for all the attention to focus on black males, their violence, their general unruliness, because that is simply how America responds to its white damsels in distress; even though the majority of rapists, killers and whatnot are white men. And have been, in this country, on this continent, for the last five hundred years.

It was a dilemma not at all new to people of color, or women. People who are routinely violated over centuries make curious denials. But I would speak to her of rape, as I spoke to her of everything that mattered. Without their presence the landscape of America seems lonely, speechless. No matter how long we live here, I feel Americans will never know anything about it. In any case, it has been destroyed now beyond knowing.

He said that white male writers, like Faulkner and Hawthorne and Mark Twain, never wrote about themselves, and that they were masters at it. In other words, I said, if white men wrote truthfully about themselves, how could they continue to fool the rest of us?

They used your love for them to make you comply with their every wish. But I watched what they did to you — and decided not to love them more than myself. She felt she had been betrayed. They would not stand up for themselves, however, and she would soon feel the rage — because if they could not stand up for themselves, and they at least had the power of whiteness in a white supremacist society — they would certainly never stand up for her [a black woman], or for real friendship or sisterhood with her. Leaving the earth bare. So I started to limit my grabbing.

I learned to find things, beautiful things, and not need to take them home. Feb 11, Visola rated it really liked it. They responded it would be incredibly hard for them to read this because they couldn't tell what was real.

I love that I couldn't tell because it's part of what a broken heart is - the bending of reality to try to return to some state of balance and grace. Navigating through the dark spaces and ugly truths that what was and is no more are intricately connect So good. Navigating through the dark spaces and ugly truths that what was and is no more are intricately connected and will never stop changing the rest of your life. This includes all of the beautiful moments, not just the ugly ones.

Walker breaks the book into a series of sections, sometimes with individual chapters within the sections. Some sections feel like fictionalized memoir barely removed from the reality that was. Others, not so much. Some of the stories feel borrowed and all of them are getting at our connections - both how they build and tear us apart. To My Young Husband "Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up wherever we perceive that another human has survived. I am looking to see if they are still beautiful, regardless of the tale they are about to tell.

And if they are still beautiful, before they say anything, I tell them they are. This is because Greatness of Beauty is how I see God. God being the common name given by many people to that which is undeniably unsurpassable, obvious and true. For most of the story, they're married and living in Mississippi - an inter-racial couple with a small daughter during the civil rights movement.

A lot of it is flashback trying to remember, mourn and capture all the love that once existed. If North America survives, it will not look like or be like it is today. One day there will be, created out of all of us lovers, an American race - remember how Jean Toomer, whom we sometimes read to each other, in Mississippi, was already talking about this American race, even in the Thirties? We will simply not let the writers of history claim we did not exist. Why should the killers of the world be "the future" and not us? It's obvious the love never vanished entirely, it was just too hurt to be expressive, even after all the years.

Orelia and John A short about a couple navigating how relationships change over time and what it means to continue loving one another. There Was a River Navigating how one decides to leave and how complicated it is to see what the relationship actually was. I think this was a bit too close to home and I'll need to come back to it later. Big Sister, Little Sister Two sisters sharing a space as grown-ups and each dealing with all the complicated emotions accumulated over the years between them.

Each of them is looking for something and sometimes it's a simple moment that bridges all the gaps from growing together. Growing Out This is an arc of developing self-awareness through relationships and family history. This is How It Happened "This is how it happened. After many years of being happier than anyone we knew, which worked me, my partner of a dozen years and I broke up.

I still loved him, in a deeply familial way, but the moments of palpable deadness occurring with ever greater frequency in our relationship warned me we'd reach the end of our mutual growth. How to end it? How to get away? When she turns to leave, she's so relieved that he's essentially already gone from her life. However, throughout the rest of her life, she's often shocked by how absent he is.

I'm not sure the story line is the same, but they could be from the same family because each feels so haunted by the other. The narrator is unnamed and could be the same. It could be shortly after her divorce as she's journeying back to herself. The next chapter of this section is the story of a young, gay woman struggling to remain connected with her mother as a religious group continues to push the mother to cut all connections with the daughter.

They see Deep Throat in the theater and discuss it all the way home. I don't see how people stand to stay married to one person for the whole of their lives. But I didn't know any better then. You'd been together the entire time I'd known you. It's more like the letter Walker wrote to her younger self and younger husband. Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we've cried in each other's arms.

We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory "safety" of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil. It cannot be sanctuary.

Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow.

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract.

That healing begins where the wound was made. It helped me mend and reminded me that all the struggles continue happening in various degrees and are never completely separate. I'm not sure I actually needed reminding, but the validation that Alice Walker provides is some of the best therapy. Aug 06, Camille McCarthy rated it really liked it. I really enjoy Alice Walker's way of writing.

She is able to write about emotions beautifully, and is very sensual. This collection was especially poignant, as it deals with her divorce and her often mixed-up feelings about her marriage and the breakup of her marriage. The other stories in the book are about affairs, mixed up feelings of loving two people at once, and the way the other people in your life react when your prominent relationship breaks apart.

This collection might be more relevan I really enjoy Alice Walker's way of writing. Since I haven't been, it didn't hit me on such a personal level, although of course I have been in relationships where, when the relationship ended, I didn't feel like I knew that person anymore, and that's one of the main feelings she expresses about her own divorce. I admire Alice Walker for her ability to write so openly about deeply personal events in her life and to write honestly about emotions.

It is clear from her writing that she has actually experienced much of what she writes about and that takes a lot of courage. I am still pondering what to put in this review She is lyrical, and real, and emotional. This collection of stories is very personal by the author's own admission , and it shows. Some may complain that the material here is too repetitive. To me, the repetition was necessary and symbolic: Sometimes, it takes this sort of outside examination to see them, to admit to them - and without that recognition, we can easily be trapped in cycles that are unhealthy. This collection is Ms.

Walker's recognition and admission of her relationship s , her possible cycles, and the growth and stagnation within them. I do not know that I would recommend this as a first reading of Walker's work.

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart by Alice Walker | www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Books

That said, it was an excellent read, and gave me pause for thought about my own relationships, and the patterns within them Although Alice Walker is a well-admired author, I read only about 60 pages of this book before I gave up. A collection of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical stories, this book was just too bitter and sad for me to want to continue.

I don't doubt her ability as an author, it is just that this book isn't for me. I read this book during a time when I was questioning whether or not I mattered in the lives of some of the people I know. I could easily put some of my story beside this story, which in a way was both healing and validating. Nov 12, Maria rated it it was amazing. Seven sensitively written short stories that made me say, "Yes. This is great writing. Jul 29, Carly rated it really liked it Shelves: My first Alice Walker book. I will definitely be reading more. Blunt and flowery, somehow at the same time.

A mind I would like to know more of!

Questions and Topics for Discussion

Aug 24, Jason Prodoehl rated it liked it Shelves: I really wanted to love this book. There were phrases, sentences, ideas, that really made the book incredible to me. However, I wasn't sure always whether it was the author talking about herself, or someone else. I suppose it doesn't really matter. Any perspective is interesting to me, no matter whose it is. There are some powerful ideas and experiences in this book, but I didn't love it as I did The Color Purple which was more of a narrative. If you are particularly interested in I really wanted to love this book.

If you are particularly interested in race in the US, or inter-racial marriage, or a host of things, you will find something worthwhile in this book. Dec 27, Wanda rated it really liked it Shelves: The writing was superb as per usual. It broke my heart that her marriage ended too. It's hard to wrap my mind around how so much love between two people dissipates, but it happens all the time and it is heartbreaking every time. Only 4 stars for this book though because some of the stories in the The writing was superb as per usual. Only 4 stars for this book though because some of the stories in the middle lost my interest.

Sep 09, Brandon Floyd rated it really liked it. Alice Walker is so painfully brilliant, and this collection speaks toward love and profound loss in ways that are beyond description. I absolutely believe that Walker sets the blueprint for activist work and self-care, and offers such wonderful advice for balancing both. There's no embarrassment here, there's no shame - there's just the resounding earnestness of opening oneself to intimacy and desire, weathering disappointment and moving forward still.

Jan 07, Kristie rated it liked it Shelves: A married woman falling in love with another woman. An interracial couple being driven apart. It was not only repetitive with her other works, but it got repetitive within this collection as well. As always, though, the writing was absolutely on point. Alice Walker is a genius with words. Each sentence is beautifully crafted. That said, I loved some of these short stories more than others. The first set was my favorite. The middle of the book, while still masterfully written, got a little old.

And then the last set of stories picked up again. I would really give this a 4.

I especially found the sections about her and her ex husband really interesting because she still speaks of it with a kind of nostalgic love.

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