I have read and reviewed this book before, but I reread it by listening to the audiobook, so I was thinking about it some more. This is a kind of collection that comes out from time to time, where the children or other literary executors from an artist work to get the writer’s work published posthumously. In this case, Kathleen Collins was primarily known as a filmmaker, but she died early in her life at 46 of cancer. In recent years, her two children were able to secure publishing of this collection of short stories and then a more miscellaneous collection of writing called Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary. It’s fitting that this second collection sounds a bit like Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumous writing To be Young, Gifted, and Black as Hansberry was an apparent influence on Collins’s work.
The collection is relatively slight at times, often offering up sketches more than full length, as we might think about them. This is hardly an issue as the writing is bright and vibrant. While Hansberry is an influence, it seems clear to me, too, that perhaps Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones were also either an influence or perhaps contemporaneous. The writing reminds me strongly of both other writers in its subject, yes, but also in the erudition and complexity of the writing. The collection is rewarding in the ways that good collections are, and of course decidedly sad by both Collins’s death, that haunts the writing, but also in the likelihood that there might be less else out there from her that we’d be able to read.