The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification

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There are many kinds of beginnings. Millner's is telling in its directness: "Maybe it's best to begin this story not when I learned I was black but when I learned I wasn't brown." Obsessed with stories, she reaches back deeply into her own, hoping to uncover the truth of who she is amid the image she has so carefully constructed. At the age of 12, she discovered that these stories involved choice and bitter consequences. While she battled for acceptance from what she believed was a black culture, her brother fought to be accepted as a Chicano -- their differences leading to a lifelong divide. But family and culture are not her only battlegrounds. Cherishing the transcendence of higher education, neither California public schools nor the hallowed halls of Harvard fill the need she has yet to identify. Organizing rallies for Harvard's underpaid workers and, later, volunteering at an impoverished South African township, Millner embraces a life of activism and service that is inspirational in its selflessness.

But Millner realizes she must make her peace with California and take home what she has learned. Doing what matters may now be Millner's life, but that she shares her struggle with readers, so truthfully and with purpose, marks her as a writer not only of grace but of conviction. The Golden Road is a provocative memoir distinguished by its refusal to compromise. (Spring 2007 Selection)

Amy Finnerty

This memoir follows a young woman's erratic maturation from working-class San Jose, where she was an African-American growing up in a predominantly Hispanic community, to Harvard and beyond-often to the back of beyond. Caille Millner also takes stabs at some socio-economic analysis-of class tribalism, the tech boom, urban real estate patterns, and other phenomena that might seem odd in the life story of a 27-year-old. But while these forays dilute the more urgent tale of her search for a moral compass, they are inextricable, ultimately, from her self-image as a smart, scraping, awkward young woman yearning for meaning and stability.
— The New York Times

Essence

Intriguing . . . Millner's searingly honest Road takes readers into a little-known experience.

San Francisco Chronicle

A sharp-minded, elegantly written memoir . . . Frank and dryly humorous.

The New York Times Book Review

[Millner's] clear-eyed, breezy recollections, delivered with a light touch, win us over.

Publishers Weekly

For most of us," writes 27-year-old journalist Millner in her sober, disheartening memoir about upward mobility in northern California, "Harvard was our first, and possibly last opportunity to be part of a substantial black community." Millner learns early on the pitfalls of identity-seeking-"I was a natural failure by the standards of virtually every paradigm of community currently in favor in America"-and instead assumes the role of participant-observer. Whether in California, on the East Coast or in South Africa, she is painfully and sometimes humiliatingly an outsider, which also liberates her to critique. In microbiographies, she describes the people in her life: her father, a professor increasingly disillusioned by higher education; Jaime, a "Mexican-from-Mexico" who didn't know his place; George, whose class struggle reflected Millner's class privilege; Spencer, a Harvard blue blood with faux activist cred. Millner disdains upper-middle-class life and values, such as obsessive academic and monetary competition ("one of the few ways I could relax enough to eat was by using drugs"). Her style is mostly functional, with some memorable literary passages that hint at mastery to come. Given its insider approach to the many Americans who are finding identities outside their prescribed groups, her highly accessible memoir is worth the read. (Feb. 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The coming-of-age genre has long been a nonfiction staple and, apart from its function in memoir, has been employed by many writers, including freelance journalist Millner (coauthor, with Oral Lee Brown, The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact To Send a Classroom of First Graders to College), to examine such issues as race and gender. Millner (born 1979) uses her own story to explore geographic and personal notions of place and the effects of change on both. The product of a troubled family and raised in Latino and Caucasian neighborhoods, she searches for her identity as a black woman, a search complicated by her parents' efforts to succeed in white America and their determination that their children do the same. As in any memoir, personal relationships here play important roles. Some of the book's most vivid passages concern the occasionally stranger-than-fiction characters she has known. Whether about family, friends, or acquaintances, these stories stand alone, not simply as chapters of her story. In quietly mesmerizing prose informed throughout by an attitude of wry objectivity, Millner makes her life thus far compelling reading and an outstanding addition to a crowded field. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/15/06.]
—M.C. Duhig

Kirkus Reviews

A young black woman's search for identity takes her from a blue-collar Latino neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., to Silicon Valley, Harvard and beyond. Debut memoirist Millner describes her childhood as a "melange of cheerful American pragmatism and Latin baroque and African-American skepticism." In each of these worlds, she remained the observant outsider. When she was a teenager, her parents, who placed a high value on education, moved the family to Almaden Valley, where she attended a nearly all-white, all-girls Catholic high school. Her struggles with racism at the school led to her first published piece, an article in the San Jose Mercury News that brought uncomfortable notoriety to the overachieving teenager. During this time, Millner was using marijuana, mushrooms, acid and alcohol; cocaine and amphetamines would follow. Fortunately, she found a better way of dealing with her anger and despair by writing for Youth Outlook, a nonprofit organization that gives disadvantaged teens a chance to report and write for the mainstream media. After high school, Millner enrolled at Harvard. The university had a substantial African-American community, but she soon became disenchanted by the disconnect between the other black students' words and their actions. During a later stay in South Africa, she had a disastrous love affair with an Englishman, a frustrating venture into political activism in a Cape Town neighborhood and a troubling visit to a settlement created exclusively for descendants of white settlers. Millner writes rather obliquely about her experiences and her occasionally bruising encounters with aspects of American culture: Concrete details take second place to feelings, andinfluential figures in her life are described in carefully crafted first-person essays. The reader is left with unanswered questions, and the author remains a stranger. Agent: Frank R. Scatoni/Venture Literary