Autobiography of a Family Photo (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed young-adult writer Woodson (Maizon at Blue Hill) crosses over to adult fiction with this family novel that's brilliant, moving, semi-surreal-and daring, as the author fearlessly loads her palette with words that can offer great color but little sense. Set in Brooklyn mostly during the Vietnam war, the story opens on a nameless black narrator, who's in the fifth grade, and her four siblings, then lets 12 years pass like gray pages of a tabloid. Chapters come in small chunks broken off from the narrator's nerve-tossed heart. Her new baby brother, Cory, is half white (and "the proof that a black man can't leave his woman for one minute without her making a fool out of him," says her annoyed father). Her gay eldest brother, Troy, spends his last night home before going to Vietnam prancing around the kids' bedroom in his mother's high heels. Her third brother, Carlos, has blue eyes whose origin baffles him, and her mother falls into a bad mood and for a week saturates herself with a new Al Green record. Nearly every stage of the narrator's growth is a kind of death, though punctuated by falling in love and by traveling to Coney Island, Cape Cod and the Statue of Liberty. Troy comes home in a casket. Daddy drinks, beats Mama, slips off. Mama gets a bad job with the phone company, then loses her voice forever, while the narrator comes into puberty and ever increasing understanding that this "world can hold a million little girls in its hand. This world can drop them." QPB featured alternate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Woodson's little novel is a coming-of-age story set in the Vietnam era, when the picture-perfect Brady Bunch set a national standard for the ideal family. Her heroine-narrator, a little African American girl, has another kind of family. She has an older brother who's a drag queen. Her younger, half-white half-brother is an endless reminder to her father of her mother's infidelity. Mother, who presses dolls on the less than enthusiastic narrator, plays Al Green records over and over and slowly waltzes with the broom, encased in her own world, wearing panties on her head when she can't find a scarf. Woodson brings the narrator to her mid-teens, poised on the brink of an awakening, struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, and literally screaming to leave her earlier life behind, "where we're the pitiful ones." This faux memoir, told with painful clarity and fervor, deserves its share of general readers as well as those who home in on women's and African American literature. Whitney Scott

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525937218
• ISBN-13: 978-0525937210
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,649,384 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite books, October 18, 2002

By	Oceana - See all my reviews

This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)

In a thrift store my eyes were drawn to the bright orange cover of a book I'd never seen before. As I moved closer I saw the title "Autobiography of a Family Photo", and a picture of a beautiful child with her eyes closed, and her face slightly scrunched against the sun.

I opened the book to the first page of the first chapter and read: "I died once. And then I died again. And then, death had no hold on me. Simple. As simple as this: Yesterday I woke up and the sky was full of blues, changing, arching over themselves. Sitting there, I watched it. And this is what I was thinking: This girl sitting here with her arms wrapped around her legs is not a girl but a woman. And in the woman there are a million little girls, bottled, muted. A million half-lives, with dark arms reaching upward, others stooped into bending, still as glass. A million girls. Dark. Bellowing. Multiplying. Chaos. Hari-Kari. War. It is inevitable. And this sky is not a sky but simply the color blue, the chaos of blue, the inevitability of blue--sky, lake, mallard, sea. Sea. Simple as..."

I was captivated. After purchasing the book no one could pull me away until I had read every last word--poetic, brilliant, familiar. A work of fiction; she writes about incest, sexual abuse, losing her beloved (gay) brother in the war, sexual exploration and becoming her own woman within a complex world.

This book has found a place in my heart alongside my other favorite authors.

1.0 out of 5 stars A Confusingly dry novel wanna-be, August 29, 2008

By	Toni Y. Williams "Toni Yvette" (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)

In the beginning Dorothy Allison author of Bastard Out Of Carolina wrote "The girl's voice will open your heart show you something you need to see look closely . This is a photo of great beauty, great heartbreak, greater love." Miss Allison how many hallucinogens did you ingest on an empty stomach before you read this sparse 113 paged novella?

Autobiography of a family photo was very disappointing. The sexual Sapphic episodes that the unnamed female character had with the others girls in the neighborhood was slightly amusing. There were too many vague scenes.

Autobiography of a Family Photo is supposedly Jacqueline Woodson's 2nd novel, all I can say is whenever in doubt, edit or elaborate. Miss Woodson had a great premise but lost it in the lyricism. It blatantly displayed the dysfunction of a dysfunctional family. The mother and father couldn't stop fighting, the older brothers were not great role models. One dressed up in womens' clothes and the other molested his baby sister. The illegimate child couldn't stop eating lead paint chips and the mother in her spare time when the father wasn't around decided to be a prostitute to make ends meet. Reading Autobiography of a Family Photo was nothing more than a very cheap thrill.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!, August 3, 2008

By	J. Besser - See all my reviews

This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)

I was fortunate enough to have found this book years ago. It is such a good book! It's very short, but poetic & beautiful. It's the kind of book that you can just read over and over again. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. It does have mature themes, so it's not for Woodson's typical juvenile audience. However it is a great book for the grown up readers out there. I can't recommend it enough! - I guess my only disappointment is that Woodson only writes for kids now, so she doesn't have any other books out there like this one.