ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace
Memoirs are one of the great gifts given to American literature by Black writers. From the autobiographical poetry of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley to the harrowing narratives of Frederick Douglass, the self-refracting fieldwork of Zora Neale Hurston and the political life of Barack Obama, they have mined their own stories to uncover something fundamental about our experience as Black people.
The writer and podcaster Carvell Wallace’s new memoir, “Another Word for Love,” arrives with great beauty, teeth and vulnerability. Wallace, now 49, has spent his late-blooming journalism career writing bold and intimate profiles of artists like Michael B. Jordan and Viola Davis, as well as more personal pieces, such as one on the cultural significance of Black horror that I think about and carry with me daily. He now turns his pen to his own life with the same poetic sensitivity and complexity.
“Another Word for Love” is arranged in short chapters across three sections: “Loss,” “God” and “Reunion,” each of which functions as a sacrament of sorts. In the first, our hero endures all manner of separations, endings and disappearances, each one deforming and re-forming him. In many ways, he and his mother grow up together — bouncing between temporary living situations, sometimes sleeping in motels and cars. Often, she would go on dates just to bring home doggy bags: “cold salty half-chewed steaks, gummy fries, rock hard cakes and chewy slices of garlic bread. It was like eating from a very nice trash can. I gorged myself whenever I could.”
Other times, Wallace recalls sating his hunger by eating from a stick of butter, relishing “the warm recklessness of it.” There are periods when he is sent to live with aunts or uncles in Pennsylvania and several days spent alone in a Los Angeles apartment because his mother is in jail for writing a bad check. (“I would say it was the ending of my childhood but I hate clichés even when I use them.”)
He also recounts struggles with substance abuse — by the time he got to college in New York in the early ’90s, he was hiding vodka in his water bottles — all while reminding us how easy it is to continue to function even within the grips of addiction: “The secret is that I was slowly rotting from the inside. … I didn’t want anyone around me to know that secret because it was mine, it made me who I was, and so I sealed the secret in, spackled it shut inside me with weed, acid, red wine, white wine, Pacifico, mushrooms and whatever else I could get my hands on.”
The second section examines our notions of capital-G God — the God in small things and the God in each of us. Wallace tells of interviewing a reporter who recounts memorable encounters with both Mister Rogers and a wanted terrorist. The two writers enter into a meditation on reporting as “a kind of human experience, a practice of being present. No need to judge. All the judging had been done.” This presence is a gift we can give to even the worst people in the world.
Looking for the divine, Wallace finds it in everything from the cosmic pull of the moon to the similarities of the markings created on a body struck by lightning and the ones endured by an enslaved man from an overseer’s whip — “the way each line splits the flesh, cleaving it into two, spreading outward in a fractal pattern of trauma.” The scars are treated here as a thing one can examine, touch, cover and soothe.
Which is the leading thematic impulse of the final part: the healing practice of reunion. Wallace describes a posthumous letter he received from his Aunt Trudy, its delivery delayed until after her death by a mistaken ZIP code, in which she tells him she loves him and misses him and can’t wait to meet his newborn son. “Maybe I had forgotten when I was a little man, I meant something to someone the way my son meant something to me,” he reflects. “I was gorgeous, people wanted to hug me and care for me. I was loved.”
There are meditations on cherry blossoms, a very stylish school picture (come on, wide lapels!) and being asked by his son about the best day in his life (it involves a beach in Mexico, moonlight, Coke in a bottle). Each anecdote continues to move the reader and implore us all to remember to connect — connect, connect, connect. The loss explored in the first section finds a beautiful conclusion in the final one and, most exquisitely, in a postscript that brings the entire experience into focus.
All memoirs are personal, but I am bowled over by how personal “Another Word for Love” felt to me. One line in particular continues to resonate: “A lot of things, I have learned, can be true at once. That is how I have survived.” Amen. This book is funny and heartbreaking, religiously vivid and lovingly open.
ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE: A Memoir | By Carvell Wallace | MCDxFSG | 272 pp. | $28
