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Shop nowWe Are Bridges
A Memoir
Narrator
Cassandra Lane
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Length
8 hours 5 minutes
Language
English
When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt’s lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.
We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family—and considers how to take back one’s American story.
Cassandra Lane is the winner of the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and managing editor of LA Parent magazine. She previously worked as a newspaper reporter, high school teacher, community relations manager for the Dodgers, and senior communications writer. She received an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. A Louisiana native, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2001.
Cassandra Lane is the winner of the 2020 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, and managing editor of LA Parent magazine. She previously worked as a newspaper reporter, high school teacher, community relations manager for the Dodgers, and senior communications writer. She received an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. A Louisiana native, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2001.
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Reviews
“A multiangled exploration of family trauma and the forging of an identity.”
“In this evocative memoir, Cassandra Lane deftly uses the act of imagination to reclaim her ancestors’ story as a backdrop for telling her own. The tradition of Black women’s storytelling leaps forward within these pages—into fresh, daring, and excitingly new territory.”
“Cassandra Lane writes with the urgency driven to the page by the necessities of that first great art: motherhood. We Are Bridges is a book of history, and as such, it uncovers and recovers the truths no classroom teacher will ever reveal to the children who need to know them most…A love story, a book of how—in spite of every obstacle—black people still make themselves vulnerable enough to take the leap and fall in (and survive!) love.”
“Cassandra Lane stretches the boundaries of traditional memoir. This is an important, beautiful work.”
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