Crossing Borders: A Memoir [Hardcover]

KATHERINE ELLIS (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2001

Telling the interracial love story of an English professor and a traditional woodcarver from a tiny Nigerian village, this powerful memoir follows one woman on her journey back into parts of her life where unresolved conflicts remain like landmines on her path.

From bouts with anorexia, her mother's alcoholic marriage, a failed marriage of her own, and her trauma after being shot and nearly killed by two black teenagers (the violent confrontation that becomes a central reference point in this story), Kate Ellis's life opens out in unexpected directions. In an attempt to come to terms with the assault, Ellis attends several black churches and volunteers to work with inner-city teenagers. While chaperoning a trip to Nigeria she meets Foley, an artist with whom she enters a marriage filled with challenges and surprises.

"It's in places where I don't belong that the blessings of my life have found me," Ellis writes. Crossing borders that separate the United States from her birthplace in Toronto, North America from Africa, marriage from singleness, privilege from poverty, and blackness from whiteness, this dramatic autobiography describes a journey of discovery that explores class, race, and feminism and, finally, reconciles the author to her own history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her late teens, Ellis (now an English professor at Rutgers University) left her upper-class Toronto family for New York City's bohemian subculture. She began as a dancer in the heady outer circles of Merce Cunningham and the Living Theater, but finally realized (thanks to some severe anorexic episodes) that she wasn't meant to be a dancer. So she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, amid the turmoilof '68, although her first husband kept her from fully participating in the era's demonstrations. After their divorce, Ellis lived the single mom/academic life, which almost ended when she was attacked at knifepoint in her apartment building's lobby by a pair of black teenagers. She immediately exorcised any tendency to racist response by attending black funerals and volunteering for youth leadership programs. Realizing that "I like to cross boundaries, to go places that people like me are expected to avoid," Ellis ultimately found herself in Nigeria, where she married a young Nigerian woodcarver. There's a lot going on here, and a lot said, too from wonderment at the advantages of a Nigerian worldview to some oddly juvenile finger-pointing at her frigid, emotionally fearful parents but not much thinking or analyzing about the bigger questions raised. How can a self-avowed independent feminist say she's marrying to "escape the country of the unloved"? How does she accept a self-denying, male-defined marriage? What does it mean to be so exhilarated by the flaunting of one's otherness at cultural borders? An odor of cultural exhibitionism may bother some readers, but 50-something feminist academics may find this memoir familiar and even engaging. 11 b & w photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Ellis (English, Rutgers Univ.), author of The Contested Castle, a study of the Gothic novel, has written a memoir that examines what some may view as the many disparate influences on her life and how they have shaped the choices she has made. With a direct and sincere approach, Ellis reveals many private details of her life, ranging from her childhood and schooling to her married life. She describes the experience of being a daughter, a wife, and an academic so compellingly and credibly that the reader often feels part of the narrator's experience. But this is no fairy tale; Ellis also openly discusses her bouts with anorexia, a failed first marriage, and getting shot and nearly killed by two teenagers. Yet all is not dark in this book either; this is a poignant story of redemption and falling in love with a traditional woodcarver from a small Nigerian village whom Ellis later married. It is also the story of "crossing borders," both psychological and physical (between the United States and Canada, and between North America and Africa). Recommended for all libraries. Sheila Devaney, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Florida; 1st edition (December 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813022843
• ISBN-13: 978-0813022840
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,031,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A provocative memoir, November 29, 2001

By 

Rachel Kranz - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing Borders: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Kate Ellis has given us a memoir that takes on race, class, gender, neocolonialism...The book moves effortlessly between the personal and psychological on the one hand, the political and historical on the other. Ellis's open, critical, and self-critical view invites us to join her as she explores the issues of her life--her struggle to create a female self in a world that represses women, her efforts to build a cross-cultural marriage in a world that polices the borders. I loved the portraits of the different worlds she's inhabited--the bohemian dance world of 1960s New York; Columbia University during the 1968 student uprising; the aristocratic Canadian home she grew up in; the Nigerian world of artists and tourists that she visits first as a traveler, then as a wife. Ellis' memoir often reads as effortlessly as fiction--but it is always grounded in a relentless honesty about the difficulties as well as the thrills of crossing borders.