Project Girl [Hardcover]

Janet McDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 21, 1999

An inspiring story of a black woman's coming-of-age.

Project Girl is the powerful story of a black woman with a genius IQ whose coming-of-age in a Brooklyn public housing project locks her into a struggle with the growing poverty, drug abuse, and violence of a neighborhood in decline.

Janet McDonald grew up in a family in pursuit of the American Dream, a dream that seemed within easy reach of the gifted student. In school, McDonald soared past her peers into a world of privilege--college at Vassar, studies in Paris, law school at Cornell--one she was prepared for only intellectually. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she held on emotionally to the project world she was poised to leave behind.

Project Girl is a story of a divided life and of the struggle to reconcile two opposing worlds. In college, there was drug abuse. In law school, an arson arrest. She suffered a nervous breakdown after a rape. Only through brains, will, and support from friends and family was McDonald able to gain control of her life.

Few books have told about the tensions of growing up gifted in the inner city so candidly, and few success stories seem as unlikely as the one narrated in Project Girl.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This rather unstructured memoir certainly contains high drama, but it doesn't quite succeed in illuminating the larger social issues?race, class, education, identity?to which it implicitly points. McDonald, the gifted child of an "old-fashioned" black family (hardworking father, tireless at-home mom) living in a Brooklyn housing project, was a "nerd" in the projects but an alienated "project girl" in the more privileged world to which her academic achievement earned her entry. She made it to Vassar in the early 1970s only to become a heroin user, but righted herself (especially during a junior year abroad in Paris) in time to enter law school. She was shattered again when she was raped, after which she expressed her rage by setting fires in her law school dorm. She returned to school and now practices law in her beloved Paris. However gripping and potentially instructive this mix of harrowing and inspirational facts are, the telling is awkward. While McDonald portrays her post-rape torment with graphic intensity, her self-analysis?especially of her heroin problem?are shallow. Her writing is fluid?so fluid that it's shame that she relies on so many previously written journal excerpts that chronicle not only her progress at work but also her mood swings, off-the-cuff remarks ("We may have a woman Vice-President!") and ideological natterings unbuttressed by thoughtful argument ("America's corporate structure... is responsible for each and every individual moment of suffering"). Despite these flaws, readers will find in these pages a spirited challenge to the idea that upward mobility is easy or comes without a heavy psychological cost.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Now practicing law in Paris, McDonald was raised in the projects of Brooklyn, NY, in the midst of poverty, drug abuse, and violence. This is the wrenching story of her escape from that life to Vassar, Columbia, and then to NYU Law School and the personal crises she surmounted along the way.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 231 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (January 21, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374237573
• ISBN-13: 978-0374237578
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,515,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book should be required reading for America!, January 24, 2000

By 

jackie - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Girl (Hardcover)

Project Girl is one of the best (if not the best book) I have read. I am from the projects and share a similar background to Janet. At the age of 40 I still did not understand some of the anger and responses I had toward people of more advantaged backgrounds, but Janet's book gave voice to many of my feelings and insecurities. It is difficult for people from more priviledged backgrounds to understand that the issue for poor blacks is more than just a matter of race. It is also a matter of class and we have had to learn to adjust to our difference in class, race and (sometimes) gender. When you are a project girl, you are trying to overcome all three! We have had to compete with others who started the race with more book knowledge and elite training at the same time that we have to learn new jobs or attend school. For example, Janet was exceptionally smart, but in high school the teachers never told her about writing footnotes. Something so basic to everyone else from better schools, but something she had to learn after she enter an elite college. I only wish she could have told us more about her life after her move to Paris. I read Project Girl the same week that I read "Trespassing" by Gwen Parker. What a difference! In Trespassing you have a black woman of immense priviledge who doesn't seem to acknowledge how all of her priviledge helped get her to the top. In Project Girl you have a black woman who gets to the top despite all of the class, family, color and gender issues. It is not a pretty story and Janet was in fact self-destructive, but having come from her world and been immersed into elite, white and male-dominated environments with absolutely no training or mentoring, I completed understand her actions. I am proud that she managed to overcome them. If you are a project girl: read this book, if you are a priviledged black person: read this book, if you are from any other group: read this book.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Obvious and not-so-obvious, May 30, 2000

By 

"wtk2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Girl (Hardcover)

After one writes that, with the publication of Project Girl, Janet McDonald has thrust herself into the company of James Baldwin and Angela Davis, then one must consider what other associations suit the book. It is easy to read but so hard to forget. The writing is pellucid. One gets an incredible sense of who McDonald is and what she has been through, without detecting any of the artifice that people usually call "style". Her style is her voice, simple as that. McDonald's book, a memoir, in coming out in the memoir-rampant post-Angela's Ashes era, has been criticized for being just another up-from-the-bottom story. Yet Frank McCourt himself wrote that Project Girl "should be placed on all high school and college reading lists and offered to anyone looking for a book beautifully written." Leafing through Project Girl for one more of the countless times I have searched it for some morsel of understanding or attitude, I discover once again that each sentence is no more and no less than a small portion contributing to the entirety of this beautiful, difficult, yearning story. It does not matter that the story is true. That it is true should make us shudder. But how do we Americans classify the book? McDonald lives in Paris now, and she might shudder to know. Project Girl does not rest on the shelf. It sticks to the mind. You can't shelve it. Every time you think you have the story down ("okay, she grew up in the Farragut Houses projects in Brooklyn, got it, terrible things there, strong family, okay-this experience-some racism, off to college" etc.) a sticky part in the story such as her brief foray into the world of the child prophet Guru Maharaj Ji will throw you off. She is an incredible person and her genius just to pull herself up time after time-a necessary genius to the chronically voiceless-is, if only commended and admired, the victim this time of condescension. It is as difficult to say what this book really is as it is difficult to deal with the seething, subtle and not-so-subtle problems that are chronicled within it. But it is also warm, forgiving and funny. It will resonate with the reader's experiences long, long after s/he has put it down.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Projectgirl by Janet McDonald, March 27, 2000

By 

VHP (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Project Girl (Hardcover)

As a member of McDonald's audience, I have realized, since reading this book, that its title may be ambiguous to some, if not, most. She is not a project manager climbing a corporate ladder. Nor is she a project, a work in progress, though aren't we all, really? McDonald is a product, a complex survivor, of the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. One of seven children whose parents migrated north from Alabama in the 1940s to stake their claim to some small part of the Promised Land, McDonald is the only one who found the will, means, and drive to navigate prestigious educational systems at Vasser, NYU, Cornell, and Columbia, ultimately, to obtain a law degree and practice in her field in Paris, France. Not bad for a projectgirl, now is it? Perhaps the most compelling aspect of McDonald's memoir is the way in which she vascillates between elevating her deserved sense of self-esteem and sliding dangerously to depths of contemplated suicide; and the sea of confusion that surrounds her abilities to succeed and excel amid her siblings' sorrowful weaknesses and failures. McDonald tells her story with gripping honesty, transitioning to a journal-entry format after she is cursed by a traumatic, haunting, and life-changing event. As she struggles toward wholeness, her writer's voice comes full circle. From beginning to end, we follow the heroic arc of her life experience to date, rising and falling, sinking and swimming through it all, always right by her side.