Overview

When Faith Adiele realizes that she’s forgotten the sound of her late grandmother’s voice, she impulsively decides to make a film. The process reveals surprises like her mummi had a thick Finnish accent and blamed her terminal cancer on “all the things I never said, moving inside me.” Set against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, Her Voice: Hänen Ääensä: A Hybrid Memoir weaves together diary entries, home movies, ichthyology, Nordic and Pacific Northwest mythologies, and YouTube language lessons to examine the legacies of trauma, class, politics, and silence on women’s creative lives. Her Voice leaps playfully and poignantly across time, memory, and history, as well as between American pop-culture and multi-ethnic/racial experiences that reveal America as always hybrid. Knitting together gorgeous shards of written memoir and essayistic musings with playwriting’s realistic dialog and fabulist DIY-collaged illustrations, Adiele’s investigation of almost-forgotten voices and images re-embodies and reminds us of what matters. When experienced together with Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies (released simultaneously as an innovative “breakout” performative, a supplemental yet stand-alone praxis that pushes the vision of Her Voice and the memoir genre over the brink ) the two books offer an innovative approach that goes beyond traditional memoir’s conventions. In an America no longer satisfied with merely privileged authorized written texts, Adiele shows us that culture, like memoir, can be hybrid, inclusive, and multiple, and yes, can be (and is always) both personal and political.

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9781680033595

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Reviews

“An entirely new mixed-race narrative that truly befits our 21st century . . . layers 4 generations upon 3 continents with 3 languages spoken and 2 cultural belief systems intertwining, all infusing life into one truly American woman, unapologetic, who refuses to see any aspect of her heritage or life experience as more important or meaningful than the other. An exultant celebration—in language and in form—of the complex intermixture at the heart of the American experience itself and in the hearts of countless Americans.”—Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult and Real American “What does it mean to lose, and then recreate from fragments of . . . ‘dreams, film clips, lists, photos, and memories,’ the beloved voice that has seemingly vanished? Her Voice is a poignant, powerful and ultimately triumphant project of inexorable love. A beautiful, breathtaking smorgasbord. . . . A feast for the heart.”—Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist “Faith Adiele has written an astonishing book—[a] coming-of-age memoir—that defies easy classification because it is finally a memoir of the soul. Adiele’s witty, painfully candid, and always sharp-eyed account leads the reader to a most profound spiritual and human truth: There is ‘no easy, static answer’ to the question, ‘What are you?’”—Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America “Rooted in childhood, culture, and the diary of her grandmother, Her Voice, takes us on a cinematic journey back in time as Adiele searches for home. A hybrid memoir, woven over generations, Her Voice is the making of a film and a story of discovery that breathes dreams into reality.”—Tara Dorabji, author of Call Her Freedom, winner of the Like Us First Novel Prize from Simon & Schuster “Literal fusion: the process of joining two or more things to form a single entity. Innovative, original, Adiele sets off a literary bomb between two worlds, then mines the truth revealed in the explosion.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day, a New York Times Notable Book, optioned by SHOWTIME “Engrossing, original. Adiele ushers us into the complications of race and identity in the 21st century.”—Toi Derricotte, author of The Black Notebooks

Author Information

Faith Adiele writes and speaks about race, culture and travel. She is author of Meeting Faith, a memoir about ordaining as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun that won the PEN Open Book Award and routinely appears on travel listicles. Her media credits include Sleep Stories (CALM app), two episodes of A World of Calm (HBOMax), and the documentary My Journey Home (PBS), about finding her family in Nigeria. Founder of the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color, she teaches at California College of the Arts and leads writing workshops around the world.

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