Anger-filled memoirs, partly straight narrative and partly excerpts
from a journal, of a professional black woman whose journey from a
low-income housing project in Brooklyn to a law office in Paris is
replete with violence, hostility, and alienation. McDonald, the
middle of seven children, was singled out early as gifted. She
recounts how a supportive program at Harlem Prep gained her
admission to Vassar. Here, in a WASP world far from her family in
the projects, her feelings of fear and isolation led her to heroin.
Fortunately, Vassar provided counseling, sent her home on medical
leave, and readmitted her the next year. She spent her junior year
in Paris, meeting blacks from all parts of the world and having
some of her racial and cultural stereotypes shattered. Law school
at Cornell followed, but her academic career was again interrupted,
this time by a vicious rape followed by a nervous breakdown. At New
York University, where she transferred, McDonald, still filled with
fear and obsessed with homicidal and suicidal urges, was arrested
for arson. Ousted from NYU, she went to the Columbia School of
Journalism, where she interned at both a French press agency in
Paris (where people are "full of life, not ambition") and at
Newsweek in New York (where she felt like "an overeducated slave on
the bottom of the white patriarch's totem pole"). Abandoning
journalism, McDonald reapplied to NYU and, at age 32, graduated
from law school. However, living in a Manhattan high-rise and
working in a midtown corporate law office was misery for her, and
her weekends were spent back at the projects in Brooklyn. "I no
longer belong in the projects, but still to them," her journal
notes. Eventually, McDonald moved to France, abandoning the US and
her struggle to belong. Powerful and painful reminder of the
enormous gap between the culture of an inner-city black ghetto and
middle-class white America - one so wide that education alone
cannot be counted on to bridge it. (Kirkus Reviews)
"An eloquent account of a remarkable life, "Project Girl" should be
placed on all high school and college reading lists and offered to
anyone looking for a book beautifully written."--Frank McCourt,
author of "Angela's Ashes"
"In her engrossing memoir, McDonald, a Brooklyn-born lawyer now
living in Paris, compares herself to Icarus because she, too,
soared and fell mightily. The difference is that after her falls,
McDonald picked herself up and charged onward."--Sara Ivry, "New
York Times Book Review"
"Devastating. . . . McDonald argues her case with lawyerly
concision, drop-dead ghetto humor, and just a touch of schoolgirl
psychobabble. . . . No wonder McDonald fled to Paris, where, freed
from the American obsession with race, she wrote this stinging
epitaph for the decade that gave us the word "yuppie.""--Susanne
Ruta, "Entertainment Weekly"
"Going to the bookstore is becoming more and more like riding in
a subway--there are a whole bunch of people with stories to tell
but very few who know how to tell a good story. Every once in a
while though, we might find ourselves sitting next to someone whose
story is so intriguing that we actually miss our stop because we
are so engrossed in their tale. Such is the effect of Janet
McDonald's "Project Girl."--Deborah Cowell, "Black Issues Book
Review
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