Brother, I'm Dying

Danticat’s first memoir—following her supremely successful debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (an Oprah pick in 1998), and three other books of fiction—farms more of her background as a Haitian-born American immigrant.

She sets up a natural push-and-pull of happiness and sorrow by relating how her father was dying from pulmonary fibrosis in New York at the same time she found out she was pregnant. The tale of her father’s death runs parallel with one from her childhood, when her parents left her at age four in the care of an uncle as they sought a better life in America. Uncle Joseph and his wife, Tante Denise, raised Danticat for eight years until her parents were able to send for her and her younger brother.

Things aren’t easy in America. She and her brother struggle to fit in with a family they hardly know: There are two American-born younger brothers when they arrive, and their parents seem like strangers or figments of foggy childhood memories.

Danticat’s beautiful prose reads as though you’re sitting at her knee, hearing a favorite story told again. Warm and inviting, she makes Haiti seem like a second home to the reader. That’s not to say Danticat waxes sentimental. Full of controlled anger and grief, the author strips her family’s history bare.—Beth Dugan