Her book is as much a book about love as it is about anger: self-love and the struggle to find and hold it; love for the many women in her life, as well as public figures from Ida B. Wells to Audre Lorde to Terry McMillan to Hillary Clinton…and at least implicitly a love of justice, of equality, of righting wrongs and telling truths. It is a sultry and generous work, and a fierce one … Cooper’s is distinct both for its telling as the author’s own journey and for its—yes—articulate personal voice, which, between her erudition (she is a professor at Rutgers) and her command of vernacular, is witty, wrenching, pithy, and pointed.
