Healing from many of the unspoken pains of her adoption journey, Wendy explores themes of love, family, loss, grief, and trauma with this book. Silence, and its impact on identity, is another major theme explored, with hopes that it will touch the hearts of so many adoptees that hold unspoken truths about their journeys. Wendy started writing poetry the year her younger sister was born, and this book features work authored between the ages of 12 and 30 from a complex adoption journey.
From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman’s necessary learning, and a Black woman’s complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.” (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.) In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford’s family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Mary’s skilled service—and each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black “help” and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years later—each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist—they began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow. Based on decades’ worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Us chronicles the two women’s friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her “oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend.” The book examines obstacles created by Wendy’s upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the work’s primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft—and together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice.
The Asylum Floor is a yearly anthology dedicated to honest inspired writing. This issue features 78 pages of poetry, stories and comics by Ted Jonathan, Mather Schneider, Tony Gloeggler, Catfish McDaris, Alan Catlin, Richard Vargas, Janne Karlsson, Dave Roskos, Jack Henry, Jenny Santellano, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Curtis Hayes, Wendy Rainey, Wolfgang Carstens, Brenton Booth, K.W. Peery and Matt Borczon. Cover by Marcel Herms and Robert Hansen.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.