Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson -- Grace After Midnight

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

There is a rawness of style to this memoir that gives it a voice in keeping with its subject matter, recalling spoken word, in slang, digression, and attitude.

It is the autobiography of a young woman from Baltimore, daughter of a crack addict, fostered almost from birth.  She learns the ways of the street, is aggressive, fearless and wild.  Until the night she is attacked and her only defense is shooting the woman she thought was about to kill her.

Out of jail after 5 years she tries to get out of ‘The Life’ to go straight.  A relationship goes sour.  She gets a job, then loses it despite working hard, because of her record.  This happens again.  And again.  So back running corners she runs into the actor Michael K Williams in a gay club, he gets her a screen test.

 

Snoop, under her real name, makes her debut in Season 3 of The Wire and becomes a prominent figure in Seasons 4 and 5.  For part of this time the real Snoop still ran her corner, was still ‘in the game’ but eventually she makes her choice.

 

As an account of how an intelligent young person can get caught up in trouble even whilst trying to keep her head down, and how there is a way out, Grace After Midnight is an important book,  As Snoop says “Acting feelings showed me how I hadn’t been feeling anything” and that’s a key insight.

 

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I really really appreciated this book when I read it a year or so ago.

One thing that struck me was how many people she had on her side throughout her life, and how that both helped her some and wasn't enough.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Yeah there was a whole load of positive in there, and in the end she got through.

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

Talk about truth being stranger than fiction. What a story!