The award-winning journalist and memoirist as well as the author of The Beautiful Struggle has written an amazing memoir that will reach out and touch the readers’ hearts; however at times this memoir does make readers get a little uncomfortable. Between the World and Me is a memoir that Coates writes in the form of a letter to his fifteen year old son, Samori. This book is told in three different parts and is about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s experience about growing up in Baltimore during the 1980s and what he witnessed during this time such as fear, racism, and the demoralization of the “black body.” Because of this memoir, Coates has successfully informed many “dreamers”, or people living in ignorance about what happened to Ta-Nehisi Coates
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The author uses key features of memoir like no other author has done, however we can compare this book to Reyna Grande’s memoir The Distance Between Us. This memoir is about Reyna Grande and how from living in a small town of Mexico, she immigrated to the US facing a lot of problems along the way such as abuse, neglected, as well as financial struggle. Both of these memoirs style is similar such as both of the authors in this memoir tell a story about their lives and they seek to tell their own version of the truth and share their own perspective on some of the events that they faced in their lives. They both feature a very blunt and straightforward truth about fear. When we compare these memoirs we can see that both of them have an underlying sense of fear. In The Distance Between Us Reyna Grande is constantly afraid and that fear is stretched throughout the entire book. She is constantly afraid for being abandoned, being abused, and being deported from from the US back to Mexico. She constantly talks about all the hardships she went through such as the amount of fear she felt when she crossed the border illegally. Reyna Grande mentions, “I glanced at the door, waiting for my sister to come, but she didn’t. I looked up at my father, at his fists, and at that moment I just wanted him to keep going, to keep beating me and beating me with those same hands that were the same shape as my own” (Grande 292). Here we can see the amount of fear that she felt when she was with her father and the way she uses imagery to describe. The same thing occurs in Coates’s memoir. He constantly lives in fear as well. He is afraid of losing his family, he fears his neighborhood, and he fears the abuse in his house. Constantly both of these authors bring up this topic and because of this the memoirs’ key features are really enhanced through this. We are able to see the blunt truth, both internal
The author uses key features of memoir like no other author has done, however we can compare this book to Reyna Grande’s memoir The Distance Between Us. This memoir is about Reyna Grande and how from living in a small town of Mexico, she immigrated to the US facing a lot of problems along the way such as abuse, neglected, as well as financial struggle. Both of these memoirs style is similar such as both of the authors in this memoir tell a story about their lives and they seek to tell their own version of the truth and share their own perspective on some of the events that they faced in their lives. They both feature a very blunt and straightforward truth about fear. When we compare these memoirs we can see that both of them have an underlying sense of fear. In The Distance Between Us Reyna Grande is constantly afraid and that fear is stretched throughout the entire book. She is constantly afraid for being abandoned, being abused, and being deported from from the US back to Mexico. She constantly talks about all the hardships she went through such as the amount of fear she felt when she crossed the border illegally. Reyna Grande mentions, “I glanced at the door, waiting for my sister to come, but she didn’t. I looked up at my father, at his fists, and at that moment I just wanted him to keep going, to keep beating me and beating me with those same hands that were the same shape as my own” (Grande 292). Here we can see the amount of fear that she felt when she was with her father and the way she uses imagery to describe. The same thing occurs in Coates’s memoir. He constantly lives in fear as well. He is afraid of losing his family, he fears his neighborhood, and he fears the abuse in his house. Constantly both of these authors bring up this topic and because of this the memoirs’ key features are really enhanced through this. We are able to see the blunt truth, both internal