Doctors said she would be ‘dead by 30’: Malorie Blackman’s memoir reveals how much she’s overcome
msn.comNoughts and Crosses series had more than 70 rejection letters from publishers before her first book was published. She had bolstered her determination by queuing for three hours to see her heroine Alice Walker at a bookshop event in London: she asked Walker to write “don’t give up” in the front of her book.
It worked. She didn’t. As she sets out here, what became a stellar career in writing for children and young adults was founded on grim determination, taking writing course after writing course, reworking her first novel Hacker from top to bottom, confounding the “soft racism of low expectations” – the schoolteacher who told her black girls don’t become English teachers – and the less soft racism of a publishing industry that showed no interest in publishing children’s stories with black protagonists.
Aptly, then, is “Perseverance” the title of one of the chapters of a memoir organised thematically rather than chronologically – the others are “Wonder”, “Loss”, “Anger”, “Representation” and “Love” – and which hops between poetry and Blackman’s loose and chatty prose.
The arrangement means that some pivotal points in her life are re-told or approached from different angles – but it has the effect of drawing the reader into Blackman’s consciousness more effectively.
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