I recently read Alice Walker's Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, a collection of her journals from 1962-2000, and it is such a fascinating and intimate exploration. It's also an act of revolution: "While Walker was keeping these journals, virtually all published diarists were white."

Some pages were tallies of her income and questions about being able to cover her expenses in her early years and then tallies and questions about real estate purchases in her later years. A sobering amount of pages were filled with the ups and downs of her romantic relationships. Some pages were about her writing life, her activism, her meditation practice, struggles with depression, her sexuality, and her garden.

The book is 500+ pages, and I was rapt! I kept thinking how brave she was to let her journals be published—most people want to keep their journals private and most authors would at least want to wait until they die before having them published. And the wild part was that at the beginning of her early journals and before all her recognition for A Color Purple she writes about having a sense that her journals would someday be published. I found this desire and ambition remarkable! And then she really didn't seem to hold back on what was included—it gets messy, as all lives do.

Walker's openness and passion for and trust in her desires is what made me want to keep reading entry after entry, and her faithful recordings of the details of life pointed toward the value she found in the supposed "mundane." I loved reading the thoughts of a woman who was writing, loving, and learning how to be at home with herself, and she's also a woman who prefers to have multiple homes, thank you very much!

Yes to it all,
Brianna