Up from Brooklyn: An Interview with Janet McDonald - author of memoir 'Project Girl' - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 2001 by Thomas E. Kennedy

In a time of memoirs, Janet McDonald's Project Girl (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) stands out amongst them. The story of a brilliant young woman growing up in one of New York City's worst slums and winding up with degrees in French literature from Vassar, in journalism from Columbia, and in law from NYU, the book affords the reader an insight into life in a black ghetto not quite like anything I have ever seen.

The story of Janet McDonald's life is one of metamorphosis, but it is no butterfly fairy tale--on the contrary, it is by turns touching, inspiring, humorous, hopeful, threatening, and terrifying. Things never quite turn out as they seem headed to. Yet you know, reading it, when this sensitive and sympathetic young woman finds herself wandering the night streets of Manhattan with a pistol in her belt and murder in her heart, or standing on the roof of a tenement firing into the sky, that you are seeing something truer than the superficial surface of fact.

It is a remarkable book about a remarkable life that spans the American social spectrum and touches the last five decades of this century of American history. It has been praised by Frank McCourt, Rosie O'Donnell, and Leeza Gibbons, as well as a myriad of reviewers for virutally every major newspaper in the U. S., including being named by the Los Angeles Times as one of the outstanding books of 1999. Consequently, she has made many appearances on French television and radio discussing topics such as the death penalty in America, Martin Luther King, Jr., blaxploitation movies, and the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

I met Janet McDonald in Copenhagen in September, 1999. The expatriate novelist Lauren Davis had suggested she phone me when she was there, and this interview started during that meeting, continued via email through the autumn, and concluded at several further meetings in Paris where she works as a lawyer, living on the right bank of the Seine, across from the Eiffel Tower, in the neighborhood where Last Tango In Paris was shot.

The humor, intelligence, alacrity, insight, and humanity so evident in her book were equally evident in her responses to my questions, in which she tells about her experience in living, writing, and publishing her book, about her life now in Paris and that of her family in the Brooklyn projects, her forthcoming works and those in progress. Her young adult novel, Spellbound, is scheduled for publication in October 2001 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Frances Foster Books imprint), and two further volumes are currently scheduled for publication in 2002--Chill Wind and Starcrossed. Currently in the works is the sequel to Project Girl, tentatively rifled Paris in the House.

TEK: Project Girl (PG) is a powerful memoir--honest, troubling, illuminating, yet also in its own unflinching way, hopeful. It is also beautifully written. Have you taken writing courses?

JMc: Not other than one traumatic English Composition class at Vassar.

Traumatic in what way?

I was the only black student in the class and had written a story about--surprise!--the projects. Similarly, other students had written about their experiences in the family, in their towns, on their travels. Their works were critiqued as writing--descriptions that worked or didn't, characters richly developed or poorly drawn, similes, metaphors, structure ... When it was time for my paper to be considered, there was silence. Then some throat-clearing, and finally one or two comments like, "Thank you, Janet, for sharing that world with us." In short, what I wrote was sociology, what others wrote was writing.

But I started writing when I was about nine or ten, little things, bizarre lists like "What to Buy When Grown" (pizza was on it), "What to Wear When Grown" (black hush puppies and black dickie), then stories about living alone on an island, about girl renegades. I moved on to exceedingly horrible poetry in high school. Started my official journal in 1979-80 when I was in my mid-twenties and pretty much stayed with that. Safer. Reams of letters, sometimes ten a day, during college.

You and Jack Kerouac. I think PG could have been equally powerful as a novel. How did you decide to do it as a memoir?

I didn't want to do a memoir at all, having been up to its publication, a woman of mirrors and shadows, crawl spaces and caves. Mostly hidden most of the time. The original proposal referred to a "fictionalized memoir." The nyet or fuggedaboutit was swift and powerful. So as I sat writing truths about myself that few knew, I began to contemplate this: What if we all simply told the truth about ourselves, the good, the bad, and the ugly, Anne Sexton-style? Maybe we would discover that our darkest secrets are already known, but in another heart. You would be amazed, Tom, the number of educated, polite and tidy young women who have `confided' to me that they identified with the most murderous rage fantasies I describe in PG. The decision to write auto, bio, and graphically was forced upon me, and I'm glad it was, for my psyche's sake and for the sake of the many people who wrote to me saying, "Thanks, your book helped me." So I just wrote it as I felt it. No memoir strategy. A friend advised me to put down the novel I was working on and write my story. For each era I was describing I would listen to music of that time, which took me back to the moment, so that I wasn't remembering as much as re-feeling. Before PG, I hadn't written much--a few articles about life in Paris (for Essence magazine and the Seattle Times newspaper), not much else. I just wrote in my journal to stay sane. After my follow-up memoir about the life of a Project Girl in Paris (since Frank McCourt called his 'Tis, I might call mine "Ain't"), I'll do fiction as best I can. In the interim, I have written a young adult novel called Spellbound for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.