This is memory.
This is the August’s mantra. She repeats it several times across the length and breadth of the narrative. Although the storyline is ostensibly focused on themes related specifically to death, grief and loss, the examination of those things are filters through the concept of memory. It is memory that is at the center of the book and at the center of this exploration is the manner in which memory can and cannot be manipulated and controlled. August is doing her level best to run from unpleasant emotions that come with the death of a loved one, but she discovers that it is much easier to run from grief than to run from memories.
The four of us together weren’t something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.
Another element which plays a role in the narrative is the predatory nature of heterosexuality. Her young girlfriends whom August is referencing here must navigate the mysterious path between their own burgeoning sexual desires and interests and the objectification of not just boys their own age, but men old enough to be their father or beyond. The possibilities of friendship as protective bond is explored alongside the larger matter of death and grief, but both themes play out through the prismatic effects of recollected memory.
“The only curse you carry, her mother said, is the dark skin I passed on to you. You gotta find a way past that skin. You gotta find your way to the outside of it. Stay in the shade. Don’t let it get no darker than it already is. Don’t drink no coffee either.”
Gigi is one of August’s girlfriends. Exceptionally beautiful, she dreams of moving to Hollywood and making it in the movies. Her mother is quite supporter of this ambition and proceeds to get her enrolled in a school for performing arts. The intentions, in other words, are good. The motivation is honorable. But this particular bit of advice offers important insight into not just Gigi’s mom, but more broadly speaking to an entire subgroup of black Americans. Desperate to protect her daughter against the inescapable and inevitable conflicts with racism she knows is certain to come, her good intentions reveal Gigi already faces that conflict every single day she lives with her mother.
The book’s exploration of how race impacts the other themes is pertinent only because the characters are, in fact, part of black society. But that very phrase—black society—endows that life with a monolithic perspective which does not exist in reality. Ironically, by instilling in her daughter advice on how to avoid being becoming "blacker," Gigi’s mom is passing along to her a racist ideology almost as malignant as the racism of white society she is trying to protect her from.
