Harris's My Soul Looks Back as though it were one of the feasts she describes in its pages-brimming with food, wine, wit, and wisdom. I finished the book eager to find a noisy neighborhood restaurant where the wine is served in mismatched glasses and the specials are under twenty dollars." - Epicurious, "I devoured Jessica B. As a bonus, each chapter has a related recipe." - Bustle, " My Soul Looks Back is a great New York City memoir I thought of James Wolcott's Lucking Out and Patti Smith's Just Kids, both documents of the city in the seventies, as well as books from an earlier New York, like Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and Mary Cantwell's Manhattan, When I Was Young. She shares a unique look at their lives and work, while also opening up about her own career and relationship with one of Baldwin's colleagues. "A friend of celebrated authors Maya Angelou and James Baldwin, Harris was part of a fascinating social circle in the early '70s. More than a memoir of friendship and first love, My Soul Looks Back is a carefully crafted, intimately understood homage to a bygone era and the people that made it so remarkable. At the center is Harris's relationship with Sam Floyd, a fellow professor at Queens College, who introduced her to Baldwin. Harris describes her role as theater critic for the New York Amsterdam News and editor at then-burgeoning Essence magazine star-studded parties in the South of France drinks at Mikell's, a hip West Side club and the simple joy these extraordinary people took in each other's company. With "simmering warmth" ( The New York Times ), Harris paints evocative portraits of her illustrious friends: Baldwin as he read aloud an early draft of If Beale Street Could Talk, Angelou cooking in her California kitchen, and Morrison relaxing at Baldwin's house in Provence. My Soul Looks Back is her tribute to that fascinating social circle and their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of Greenwich Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day-luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. In the Technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B.
Harris recalls her youth "surrounded by some of the most famous creative minds of the seventies and eighties.James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Nina Simone" ( New York magazine)-in a vibrant, lost era of New York City. In this captivating new memoir, award-winning writer Jessica B.
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