Raw and real Maya

4.5 stars
I was uneasy about this book in its initial pages because I wasn’t sure it could top the lyrical sweetness and rawness of her first memoir but this second one is much more raw in a dark way. This follows her teen years as a single teen mother, trying to make a life for herself out of her native home of Stamps, Arkansas. She isn’t Maya or Marguerite anymore, but “Rita” a firecracker, windmill of a woman who above all just wants every woman’s dream to be picked up and carried away by a man who will adore and care for her and 1-year old Guy. Each new chapter of her life usually involves a man, and an ultimatum. Her memoir is testimony to the saying that it’s “an underworld rat race for survival”. And black women are the brunt of the Mental, Emotional, and Physical abuse in that cold world. It absolutely shocked me that Maya Angelou had lived such the hard life that she described and I respect her dearly for having lived through it all.