Project Girl

Project Girl. There are millions of us, but very few will ever experience the convergences necessary to get our story in print. Some of that has to do with our rush to forget the trek from grits-to-Gucci, an understandable if sad price to pay for living life as a corporate makeover. But thank God, Janet MacDonald didn't forget a thing. And her buzz saw of a mind sent chips flying to hell and back to present us with a story so gripping, I often found myself holding my breath long after the sentence had ended. Even the most casual reader can understand this tale of wars: the one where Janet constantly squares off against her self; the one where she jousts interminably with the self she showed to others; the wars with forces beyond, as well as those completely within, her control. Sometimes vanished, sometimes victor, she never asks you to feel sorry for her even when she faces the horror every woman on earth lives in fear of. And, yet, the only time she sinks to a blame fest is when she repeatedly skewers some mental health practitioners of arguably questionable skill. PROJECT GIRL is a straight ahead rendering of one brilliant black woman's mottled life in these United States of America. And that is, perhaps, the most incredible gift of this outpouring: not MacDonald as Role-Model-for-All-Corporate Wannabes, not MacDonald as Queen-of-the-Up-by-My-Boostraps-Crew, not MacDonald as some Over-the-Rainbow-See-How-I-Slew-my-Demons-all-by-Myself, but MacDonald as human, flawed, honestly laying out a personal, story of race, gender, class, and, yes, politics. In fact, that's precisely how PROJECT GIRL escapes being "just a memoir." It is so refreshingly clear and purposefully disturbing as it peels back the layers of race, class, gender and power that make up all our daily life. By the time MacDonald is through with us, we are completely exhausted and all we did was watch. In the end, we have peeped the inner workings of a whole range of hallowed institutions--from the nuclear family, to wealthy college campuses, to elite workplaces, to the criminal justice system, to the mental health industry. MacDonald's is an irreverent, relentless, priceless eye.PROJECT GIRL is a triumphant beginning. The rest of this story has yet to be told and is definitely worth waiting for.

I finished reading this book a few days ago and I am still feeling the after effects. It took me longer than usual to complete this book because it left me feeling depressed so I would put it away for a day or two. It seemed when the author took one step ahead, something would happen that would put her two steps behind. But I would get angry at her sometimes because as her mother said she had book smarts and brains but no common sense. I don't know if the maginitude of her intelligence (she qualified as a MENSA member) made it so she could not deal with mundane details. But I cannot blame the fact that she came from the projects for some of her trials and tribulations. As one previous reviewer said, Ms. McDonald had more going for her than alot of kids from her circumstances, namely an intact family with loving parents particularly a father who embraced education. How many kids from the ghetto could cut classes, use drugs, and have run-ins with the law and still graduate from ivy league schools and work for major law firms and fit in easily in Paris? Not many, I would think. But it would seem that she was doomed-- government set-ups, assault, etc. Some reviewers disparaged Gwendolyn Parker's "Trespassing: My Sojoun in the Halls of Privilege" (See my review)for having a smooth ride. Her story as an upper-middle class black women traveling down the some of the same roads as McDonald is a contrast but oh how similar. They both experienced racism in college and cooperate America. Though I was often frustrated with the author (I wonder if living in Paris now has vanished her guilt, anger, suicide, and homocidal urges) I gave this book five stars because it deserved it for it's insightful journey and the bravery the author has displayed that could have brought down Kennedy.

After one writes that, with the publication of Project Girl, Janet McDonald has thrust herself into the company of James Baldwin and Angela Davis, then one must consider what other associations suit the book. It is easy to read but so hard to forget. The writing is pellucid. One gets an incredible sense of who McDonald is and what she has been through, without detecting any of the artifice that people usually call "style". Her style is her voice, simple as that. McDonald's book, a memoir, in coming out in the memoir-rampant post-Angela's Ashes era, has been criticized for being just another up-from-the-bottom story. Yet Frank McCourt himself wrote that Project Girl "should be placed on all high school and college reading lists and offered to anyone looking for a book beautifully written." Leafing through Project Girl for one more of the countless times I have searched it for some morsel of understanding or attitude, I discover once again that each sentence is no more and no less than a small portion contributing to the entirety of this beautiful, difficult, yearning story. It does not matter that the story is true. That it is true should make us shudder. But how do we Americans classify the book? McDonald lives in Paris now, and she might shudder to know. Project Girl does not rest on the shelf. It sticks to the mind. You can't shelve it. Every time you think you have the story down ("okay, she grew up in the Farragut Houses projects in Brooklyn, got it, terrible things there, strong family, okay-this experience-some racism, off to college" etc.) a sticky part in the story such as her brief foray into the world of the child prophet Guru Maharaj Ji will throw you off. She is an incredible person and her genius just to pull herself up time after time-a necessary genius to the chronically voiceless-is, if only commended and admired, the victim this time of condescension. It is as difficult to say what this book really is as it is difficult to deal with the seething, subtle and not-so-subtle problems that are chronicled within it. But it is also warm, forgiving and funny. It will resonate with the reader's experiences long, long after s/he has put it down.

As a member of McDonald's audience, I have realized, since reading this book, that its title may be ambiguous to some, if not, most. She is not a project manager climbing a corporate ladder. Nor is she a project, a work in progress, though aren't we all, really? McDonald is a product, a complex survivor, of the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. One of seven children whose parents migrated north from Alabama in the 1940s to stake their claim to some small part of the Promised Land, McDonald is the only one who found the will, means, and drive to navigate prestigious educational systems at Vasser, NYU, Cornell, and Columbia, ultimately, to obtain a law degree and practice in her field in Paris, France. Not bad for a projectgirl, now is it? Perhaps the most compelling aspect of McDonald's memoir is the way in which she vascillates between elevating her deserved sense of self-esteem and sliding dangerously to depths of contemplated suicide; and the sea of confusion that surrounds her abilities to succeed and excel amid her siblings' sorrowful weaknesses and failures. McDonald tells her story with gripping honesty, transitioning to a journal-entry format after she is cursed by a traumatic, haunting, and life-changing event. As she struggles toward wholeness, her writer's voice comes full circle. From beginning to end, we follow the heroic arc of her life experience to date, rising and falling, sinking and swimming through it all, always right by her side.

Project Girl is one of the best (if not the best book) I have read. I am from the projects and share a similar background to Janet. At the age of 40 I still did not understand some of the anger and responses I had toward people of more advantaged backgrounds, but Janet's book gave voice to many of my feelings and insecurities. It is difficult for people from more priviledged backgrounds to understand that the issue for poor blacks is more than just a matter of race. It is also a matter of class and we have had to learn to adjust to our difference in class, race and (sometimes) gender. When you are a project girl, you are trying to overcome all three! We have had to compete with others who started the race with more book knowledge and elite training at the same time that we have to learn new jobs or attend school. For example, Janet was exceptionally smart, but in high school the teachers never told her about writing footnotes. Something so basic to everyone else from better schools, but something she had to learn after she enter an elite college. I only wish she could have told us more about her life after her move to Paris. I read Project Girl the same week that I read "Trespassing" by Gwen Parker. What a difference! In Trespassing you have a black woman of immense priviledge who doesn't seem to acknowledge how all of her priviledge helped get her to the top. In Project Girl you have a black woman who gets to the top despite all of the class, family, color and gender issues. It is not a pretty story and Janet was in fact self-destructive, but having come from her world and been immersed into elite, white and male-dominated environments with absolutely no training or mentoring, I completed understand her actions. I am proud that she managed to overcome them. If you are a project girl: read this book, if you are a priviledged black person: read this book, if you are from any other group: read this book.