The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart [Paperback]

Alice Walker (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 2001 Printing edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965118029
• ISBN-13: 978-0965118026
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,686,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Walker is one of the most prolific writers of our time, known for her literary fiction, including the Pultizer Prize-winning The Color Purple, her many volumes of poetry, and her powerful nonfiction collections. Walker's most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir. Her advocacy for the dispossessed has spanned the globe. She lives in Northern California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alice Walker never disappoints, October 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (Hardcover)

This is a beautiful book. It is a collection of related stories about love and heartbreak, but typical of Alice Walker, it is never bitter. When reading something that I know is autobiographical, the temptation is strong to wonder which parts "really happened" and which are made up or embellished. However, I found myself letting go of that urge once I sank into the book (which I read in one afternoon). Every word that Alice Walker writes is true - it doesn't matter which details were made up or changed, Alice Walker always writes of truth and beauty.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Bittersweet and Binding...., October 21, 2000

By 

Zon Mundhenk "Zons" (Lost In America) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (Hardcover)

Walker is, in this book, as always, compelling and lyrical, binding the soul of the reader into the souls of her characters. I wept, actually, reading "To My Young Husband", a story that resonates so painfully right now in my life as my young husband divorces me for another woman.

But as I read, and read these stories of broken hearts, of broken dreams, I realized that this book lacked what I desperately desired: an easy answer, a simple way forward. How DO I survive this? It seems that Walker's characters simply limp on, terminally scarred, never recovering, just surviving. And maybe, just possibly, that will be the way for me; I will go on, but never recover. I lack any sisters to go on midnight swims with, I lack an Auntie Putt-Putt to tell me how much more terrible things could be. Perhaps this book holds too much of brutal reality, that innocence and joy, once lost, cannot be regained.

This is not a book of hope, or cheery good endings, of neatly tied strings. It is not "Echinacea And Tofu Soup For The Soul". But it is beautiful, and terrible, and true, and well worth reading many times.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic!, October 14, 2000

By 

"mentorearl" (Indianapolis, Indiana United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (Hardcover)

Alice Walker has returned with what is certainly her best work in years. After releasing the self-indulgent essays in "The Same River Twice" and "Anything You Love Can Be Saved" and the mediocre "coming out" novel "By the Light of My Father's Smile" (as a Walker novel it's standard fare; as a "coming out" story it's disappointing- lesser artist have done better)Walker returns with a collection of short stories that ranks among her novels "The Color Purple," "The Temple of My Familiar" and "Possessing the Secret to Joy." At first one may be tempted to think that these stories are merely Walker's version of the cliche "If it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger" but these stories go deeper than that, particularly in "To My Young Husband- Memoir of a Marriage," the autobiographical piece in which Walker recounts her marriage to a white, Jewish civil rights lwayer in Mississippi during the '60's. There is an ache that runs through this piece that the reader actually feels as they're reading it. There is also the hilarious story "The Brotherhood of the Saved" in which the protaganist takes her elderly mother and aunts to see an adult film; deals with her relationship with her father and "The Brotherhood" who are meddling- sorry- trying to help save her uncle's soul before his death after years of descrimination. There is also the wonderful story of Orelia and John that follows "Memoir of a Marriage," in which a woman is contemplating an affair with a colleague, but instead tells her partner about her feelings and they work through them together, loving their way back to each other. This book assert that, as Walker told NPR in a recent interview, "you can bear the unbearable" because "the way forward is with a broken heart."