What We Lose - Softcover

An Amazon Best Book of July 2017: In its simplest form, What We Lose tells a story of a young African American woman coming to terms with adulthood and the death of her mother. As Thandi tries to process the truths that cannot possibly be, she swings from gut emotion—“She’s gone. But she’s here, I can feel her. I can see her that day they told us that everything was going to be all right. But she’s not here. But I can feel her arms around me. It feels like the breeze coming off the river...it smells like her breath.”—to searing observations about the word in which we live: “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like a being a well-dressed person who is also homeless...you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe.” The novel weaves in and out of the past and present, from memories of childhood to Thandi’s own pregnancy and love affairs, to visits to her mother's childhood home in Johannesburg. There are photographs, graphs, drawings, pages filled with a single line that infuse the story with an immediacy. Through Thandi’s pain and process, she (re)constructs her identity from the memory of her mother, family, her experiences, and the reality of the world that surrounds her. A breathtaking novel. --Al Woodworth

Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, the Paris Review Daily, Transition and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College.