Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me

"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."--Toni Morrison

For Glory Edim, that "friend of my mind" is books. Edim, who grew up in Virginia to Nigerian immigrant parents, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age thirty, but her love of books stretches far back: to public libraries alongside her little brothers after elementary school while her mother was working; to high school librairies where she discovered books she wasn't being taught in class; to dorm rooms and airplanes and subway rides--and, eventually, to a community of half a million other readers.

When Edim's father moved back to Nigeria while she was still a child, she and her brothers were left with a single mother and little money, often finding a safe space at their local library. Books were where Edim found community, and as she grew older, she discovered the Black writers whose words would forever change her life: Nikki Giovanni through children's poetry cassettes; Maya Angelou through a critical high school English teacher; Toni Morrison while attending Morrison's alma mater, Howard University; Audre Lorde on a flight to Nigeria. In prose full of both joy and heartbreak, Edim recounts how these writers and so many others helped her to value herself: to find her own voice when her mother lost hers, to trust her feelings when her father remarried, to create bonds with other Black women and uplift their own stories.

Gather Me is a glowing testament to the power of representation and the lasting impact of literature to gather our disparate parts and put them back together.