Book Reviews: Alice and Rebecca Walker

In a new, cathartic memoir, Alice Walker comes full circle, revealing details of her 10-year marriage and subsequent divorce from the man who nurtured her talent and celebrated her heritage.

And this January, readers can get a distinctly different glimpse at the same family in the writing debut of her daughter: "Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self."

Both works are achingly personal as they tell a tried-and-true love story -- meeting, marrying, creating a child -- against the racially charged backdrop of Mississippi in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 56-year-old Walker opens her new book, "The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart," with a note about her former husband, Mel Leventhal. She had spoken to him only rarely in 20 years.

"Humor and affection joined us, more than anything. And a bone-deep instinctive belief that we owed it to our ancestors and ourselves to live exactly the life we found on our paths," she writes. "It was a magical marriage."

The book, a series of essays she describes as "mostly fiction, but with a definite thread of having come out of a singular life," ends a 30-year cycle of writing, she explains. Walker talks about her family and career in an interview at her home on a Berkeley hillside, where rooms are decorated with Native American and African art and stacks of books on the floor reveal a range of tastes from a biography of slain rapper Tupac Shakur to an artful look at dreadlocks.

"Part of what I hadn't written about was my marriage," she says. "Writing about it has helped me a lot because there were some loose ends that needed to be tied off."

Exploring the pain of losing their love also helped her heal, she adds. "Whatever I'm writing about, there are people going through exactly that at that time," she says. "It can be a real medicine."

At 30 years old, Rebecca Walker found she needed some medicine as well. "I want to be closer to my mother, to have something run between us that cannot be denied," writes Rebecca, who took her mother's last name when she was a high school senior. "I want a marker that links us tangibly and forever as mother and daughter. That links me tangibly and forever with blackness."

Educated at Yale University, she's an activist who founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating young women's leadership skills.

Alice Walker, author of more than two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, most notably 1982's "The Color Purple," says she and her daughter are close friends, live near each other in Berkeley and see each other often. Rebecca also has a good relationship with Leventhal, Alice says.

She has read her daughter's book, but refuses to discuss it other than to say she enjoyed it and she understands her daughter's confusion and frustration about finding her place in the world.

Dressed in black from head to toe, Alice Walker seems at peace as she sits barefoot on a sofa. She has just returned from a weeklong Buddhist retreat in Marin County where no talking, writing or reading is allowed. She loves it.

"Silence is the best possible place for creativity," she says.

She has no qualms about how she raised Rebecca -- she stopped working when her daughter was born to give "her a full year of my undivided attention.

"It's hard for her to understand all that we were trying to do ... to correct centuries of violence and abuse," she explains.

Rebecca was in the third grade when her parents separated, after her father's affair with a white, Jewish, woman. "My parents sit me down and tell me they are not getting along, that me and Mama are going to move to another neighborhood and Daddy will come to pick me up on weekends. They might as well have told me we were moving to live with penguins on the North Pole," she writes.<