Another Brooklyn

Another Brooklyn is a 2016 novel by Jacqueline Woodson. After the narrator, August, returns home to care for her dying father, she runs into her former friend Sylvia. This encounter leads her to reflect on her childhood in Brooklyn in the 1970s and the way she coped with her mother’s death. The novel unfolds in fragments: each chapter moves between August’s girlhood memories and adult life as an ivy-league educated anthropologist who studies cultural rituals around death and mourning. As she moves rapidly between scenes, locales, and time periods, August thus emphasizes the non-linear character of both grief and memory.

The novel begins in the early 2000s, when August meets up with her brother after her father’s funeral. While the two were close as children, they have now grown apart: her brother is a devout member of the Nation of Islam and is expecting his first child with his wife Alafia; he takes comfort in Allah. Meanwhile, August eats bacon (contradictory to Islam mores) and takes solace in her training. While she believes she “finally answered” (9) the momentous question of death, her run-in with Sylvia on the subway back to Brooklyn leads her to think back to the friendships she has not finished mourning.