Whatever I felt when I was reading Samuelsson’s book has absolutely changed for me. I read it the first time with my bias against the genre fully intact. I resented him skimming over the surface of his life, leaving so many parts of his journey unexplored, his lack of introspection, the un-memoir of it all, the lack of any emotional feel. On my second read, I was so aware of my white privilege, struck by my easy passage through life, blending freely without a thought. I wore it on every page as Samuelsson went from one white inhabited kitchen in Sweden to Austria to Switzerland to France to New York. Shame on me.
This White Woman Learns to Read a Black Man’s Memoir
