Emily Bernard is a master storyteller. She writes with an honesty and vulnerability that is uncommon. These stories are about what it means to be human—to love, to hurt, to heal. They will make you think, re-think, feel, and grow.”
—Nana-Ama Danquah, author of Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey through Depression
"Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages."
Elizabeth Gilbert
“My very favorite book that I have read so far this year…It’s really life changing. If you get no other book this year, get Black Is the Body by Emily Bernard.”
Ann Patchett
"Of the 12 essays here, there's not one that even comes close to being forgettable. Bernard's language is fresh, poetically compact, and often witty ... Bernard proves herself to be a revelatory storyteller of race in America who can hold her own with some of those great writers she teaches."
Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Familiar and comforting like your bed on a sleep-in morning, yet somber like the toll of a mourning bell, these essays are the voice of professional-class blackness lived adjacent to white people and within white structures, in which continually thinking through what it means to live in a black body and present and defend blackness is inevitable and essential for survival. Thoughtfully examines our obligation to our ancestors and our children, to friends and colleagues, to those who ought to know better and those who don’t, while remaining ever vigilant in the act of caring for our own self. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of Real American: A Memoir
"Black Is the Body brings lucidity, honesty, and insight to the topics of race and interracial relationships ... quietly compelling ... [Bernard's] stories get under your skin."
Carlo Wolff, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Bernard's lyrical book details traumas and pain from decades past to interrogate the nuances of her own life: growing up black in the South, marrying a white man from the North, and surviving a violent attack which unleashed the storyteller in her."
Entertainment Weekly
"Echoes of Joan Didionterse yet beautiful writing, a bracing honestyin the graceful new essay collection by Emily Bernard ... Black Is the Body marks the debut of an essayist in command of her gifts, a book that belongs beside the best of contemporary autobiography."
Hamilton Cain, Chapter 16
"Conceived while the author was hospitalized after being stabbed by a white man, these 13 formidable, destined-to-be-studied essays mark the emergence of an extraordinary voice on race in America."
Oprah Magazine
"Like the absurdly devastating crime that opens this riveting collection, Bernard's essays are impossible to turn away from. Linked by the author's powerful voice and by her experiences of the worldof survival, of falling in love, of interracial marriage and friendship, and of motherhoodeach account tells the agonizing story of race in America with realism, nuance, and profound hope. A supremely honest and utterly gripping book."
Nell Freudenberger
"Bernard's honesty and vulnerability reveal a strong voice with no sugarcoating, sharing her struggle, ambivalence, hopes, and fears as an individual within a web of relationships, black and white. Highly recommended."
Library Journal (starred review)
"Lucid ... deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning ... [Bernard] illuminates a legacy of storytelling ... and elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites. A rare book of healing."
Kirkus (starred review)
"Contemplative and compassionate ... Bernard's voice is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race ... [Her] wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this collection."
Publishers Weekly
08/01/2021
Bernard, a Black literature professor from the South who now lives in Vermont, writes about the role of race in her life and her family's.
11/12/2018
Bernard, a University of Vermont professor of English and race and ethnic studies, intimately explores her life through the lens of race in this contemplative and compassionate collection of personal essays. As a Yale graduate student, Bernard was the victim of a mass stabbing, an event at the center of the book’s opening essay, “Beginnings,” and her premise that writing about and remembering a traumatic past is a process “fundamental in black American experience.” She aims to “contribute something to the American racial drama besides the enduring narrative of black innocence and white guilt,” in essays that include “Teaching the N-Word” and “Motherland,” about adopting and raising two girls from Ethiopia with her white husband. Bernard’s voice throughout is personable yet incisive in exploring the lived reality of race. By examining her family’s Southern roots and her present life in Vermont, in “Interstates,” she explores the differences and the bridge between white and black in her life. In “Black Is the Body,” a beautiful reflection on racial difference and disparities, she acknowledges how race has informed “everything I do, and everything I write.” Bernard’s wisdom and compassion radiate throughout this thoughtful collection. (Feb.)
★ 2018-10-23
A memoir in essays about race that is as lucid as the issue is complicated.
Though Bernard (English and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies/Univ. of Vermont; Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, 2012, etc.) is a scholar, her latest book is almost devoid of jargon. Instead, the writing is deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning. The author makes no claims to have all the answers about what it means to be a black woman from the South who has long lived and worked in the very white state of Vermont, where she might be the first black person that some of her students have encountered. From the evidence on display here, Bernard is a top-notch teacher who explores territory that many of her students might prefer to leave unexplored. She is married to a white professor of African-American Studies, and she ponders how his relationship with the students might be different than hers, how he is comfortable letting them call him by his first name while she ponders whether to adopt a more formal address. The couple also adopted twin daughters from Ethiopia, which gives all of them different perspectives on the African-American hyphenate. But it also illuminates a legacy of storytelling, from her mother and the Nashville where the author was raised and her grandparents' Mississippi. "I could not leave the South behind. I still can't," she writes, and then elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites there: "We were ensnared in the same historical drama. I was forged—mind and body—in the unending conversation between southern blacks and whites. I don't hate the South. To despise it would be to despise myself." The book's genesis and opening is her life-threatening stabbing by a deranged white stranger, a seemingly random crime. Toward the end of the book, she realizes that "in every scar there is a story. The salve is the telling itself."
A rare book of healing on multiple levels.