By Patricia Foster
The University of Alabama Press, 2023
Paper, $24.95
Genre: Memoir
Reviewed by Ken Autrey
Patricia Foster’s most recent memoir, Written in the Sky, builds on two previous books that beautifully document her ongoing efforts to reconcile the constraints of her upbringing in south Alabama with her restless urge to experience and contribute to a broader, more inclusive world. Her title comes from an assertion by James Baldwin about racial injustice in America: “The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky.” Collectively, Foster’s work reveals her growing self-awareness and evolving commitment to the challenge implicit in Baldwin’s statement.
Her first memoir, All the Lost Girls, concerns her early, often thwarted, efforts to define herself as a southern woman and then to forge her own path in art, literature, and social action. Her second book is a series of essays on her efforts to grapple with the racism and class struggles she’s witnessed while reaching maturity as a writer. This third memoir, subtitled Lessons of a Southern Daughter, begins with a letter to her grand-niece in which she describes her 2018 visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. As she reflects on this powerful experience, she recalls her own early awakening to racial injustice. As the book unfolds, Foster delves into family history while paying homage to individuals who influenced her along the way.
Her mother was from the outset a dominating influence. She grew up poor but struggled to educate herself, married a doctor, and became a pillar of her community. Foster views her with a mix of respect and disdain, as a woman “trapped in a family, a history, and a class.” As she tries to fit the pieces of her mother’s life together, she feels as though she’s “blazing a trail of redemption, rhetorically evening the score.” The book concludes with a series of visits to her 95-year-old mother, near death, dependent on others, but still lively in her urge to control even the details of her funeral and burial.
Late in the book, Foster turns also to her father, who died of pancreatic cancer some twenty years before she lost her mother. A successful small-town doctor, he had high hopes for each of his three children. Early on, he supported his two academically-oriented daughters as fully as he did his athletic son, but his view of success entailed professional credentials and money. He adamantly resisted Patricia’s attraction to art and literature, while supporting her sister Jean’s decision to become a doctor. Finally, after succeeding as a writer and professor at the University of Iowa, Foster returns home and achieves a kind of reconciliation with her dying father.
Through her narrative, Foster credits various individuals who supported her interests, so at odds with family expectations. Her music teacher, Mama Dot, an “artistic, liberated woman who disliked hierarchy and fancy privileges,” helped her realize “that someday I might feel differently about myself.” Much further along, she credits a cranky, somewhat aloof writing professor at Iowa (James Alan McPherson) for convincing her that she may have a future as a writer.
Before bringing a group of Iowa students to Montgomery in 2019 to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center, Foster is inspired by an autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, an Alabama native and wife of a man who later held an important position in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Upon returning to her home state, Durr poured her energy into supporting the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights causes. According to Foster, Durr had “internalized the mythology of southern women, then broken free.” Foster also sees herself in this light.
Patricia Foster’s journey from her upbringing amid white privilege to her exploration of what she might do to heal racial divisions in our country is itself a source of inspiration. She shows great fortitude in breaking free of her family’s expectations and, later, in her effort to find common ground with black students and townsfolk in Tuskegee, Alabama. In writing that is often lyrical and uplifting, Written in the Sky documents Foster’s personal struggle for self-definition and her concurrent realization that this quest can come only with a commitment to the tough work of healing our troubled society.
Ken Autrey’s work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, and many other journals. He has published three chapbooks, the most recent of which, Penelope in Repose, won the 2021 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest. His collection, Circulation, is forthcoming from Dos Madres Press. Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University, Autrey lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he helps coordinate the Third Thursday Poetry Series.
