She’s revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women’s rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn’t buy in to Alice’s beliefs – her [hot] daughter, Rebecca, 38.
Here the writer describes what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a cultural icon, and why she feels so blessed to be the sort of woman 64-year-old Alice despises – a mother.
Wow I didn’t know her daughter was so pretty.
Yeah Alice doesn’t get invited to the Oprah Spiritual Weekends because she is bugfuck crazy. Unfortunate because The Color Purple is really fucking awesome.
I still don’t like it when kids dis their parents. I’m not saying there should be a biblical injunction or anything. It just don’t sit right with me.
She is. Those more “perfect” faces become cloying after awhile.
#2: I get weirded out by that too.
When you going to start a “Hillary is waiting for someone to assassinate Obama thread?”
Hurry! I want to beat up the bitch.
Too late.
#3: I agree. The face with the arresting curves or odd-colored eyes (or the delightful spray of freckles) is always the one that you never tire of looking at.
I don’t know if that’s what the picure is showing, but my nose has been broken twice, and has the same asymmetry. I’ve occassionally worried about it. Never again.
For those in the know: Is minic a bhris béal duine a shrón.
Sounds like Rebecca got dissed first. And disowned, so, whatever…
She sounds well grounded, which is an accomplishment of its own.
hf
I think this is Rebecca’s rebuttal, rather than a dis on her mom. And it is less a personal rebuttal than to take on the darkside of radical, self-hating feminism.
What kind of female would both try to stomp out the “maternal” instincts of her female child and also disdain the child’s achievement in going to Yale because the dreaded male is there?
I still don’t like it when kids dis their parents.
Being beautiful was revenge enough.
Remind me never to tell you about my mother and the raccoon.
#10: Pablo her mother is a complete and unadulterated cunt. I think I am always uncomfortable when I read a story like this one or even Mommy Dearest is that I had the “don’t put your family’s business in the streets” thing drilled into me. I can understand why people need that kind of catharsis after growing up with such beastly creatures as parents, but it still makes me wince.
Shit like that makes me really, really grateful for my parents (may my dad rest in peace) – even when mom calls me at 1am to ask me what a four-letter word for ‘seaweed’ is.
Forgive my ‘creative’ sentence structure.
Wow I didn’t know her daughter was so pretty.
There are no ugly interracial children. Or not very damned many, anyway.
Personally, I view Phoebe Cates and Rae Dawn Chong as the best possible arguments for miscegenation.
I guess Tiger Woods would be a good argument, too, if my tastes ran in that direction.
It’s just not something you put on stage like that. I rebut my parents’ ideas here a lot everyday. Some of them anyway. I can’t really think of any right now actually.
Well, her dissing really just shows how shallow some of Alice Walker’s philosophy’s are. And, it’s rather cold that her mum hasn’t spoken to her since she got pregnant. Makes me think why the fuck should I listen to a word Alice has to say?
Reading her essay, I can’t but help think that Gloria Steinem’s children would have faced a similar upbringing.
kelp?
That raccoon was on the street.
Alice Walker doesn’t get invited to the spiritual weekends? I had no idea she was that far gone.
An amazingly touching story.
I wish her luck.
agar?
teh orrible
…she is bugfuck crazy. Unfortunate because The Color Purple is really fucking awesome.
Like Raymond Chandler is supposed to have said: If you liked a book, don’t meet the author.
#24: Excellent. And so right.
Oh, OH. Her daughter is doing it wrong: I just read this interview of her noting:
interview of Alice, that is.
Rebecca, 38.
Good Luck and Godspeed.
Link to that interview with Walker here
Oh. Bugfuck crazy. That’s like for real mentally ill bugfuck crazy.
Oh, WP is still not liking links. Google “chapman” “walker”, and “fig tree” if you are curious.
SarahW: Is this the one?
I’ve found that using TinyURL sometimes helps when PW doesn’t like a link.
And yeah, that’s some professional-grade crazy there, both on the part of Walker and the fawning reporter.
Of course, it’s the Grauniad, so what can we expect? Kim Jong Il probably wasn’t giving interviews that week.
Yes, PW sometimes objects to links with commas or percent symbols in them.
Nori?
Nori Barnacle would make a great name for a character in SpongeBob.
What’s Pheobe’s deal? Oh, and Zöe Kravitz.
The delectable Ms. Cates (birth name: Phoebe Katz) is Jewish, Chinese, and Filipina.
wow.
alice walker is perhaps the greatest twat featured on PW in several months. She isnt Deb Fr**ch, but they would share a plate of wings, if you dig.
In the name of gender equity, In a day where we had narcissitic, narcolpetic serial leg-spreader Emily Gould and ALice Walker, who has the emotional core of Martin bormann, I think we need to feature some white male douches tomorrow.
SPB – My failed link was to was a New York Mag piece – here, entitled “Alice Walker Confesses Tracy Chapman Affair to Someone Other Than Oprah” Piccy goodness.
We did Olbermann yesterday already. Let’s do Jeff Zucker.
YAY tinyurl! thanks for the tip, SPB.
Happyfeet, I was intrigued by Zucker’s described banality.
Oh. I mostly meant what he greenlights. But that says a lot about people.
Is Michael Moore played out?
She looks a lot like the author Zadie Smith who is beautiful, but whose book I did not adore.
– We spent a couple of decades, so plum full of self-examination angst as a society we were even willing to digest long tomes of pathological gut wrenching diagnosis, the kind psychiatrists love, masquerading as identity politics cum social awakening enlightenment.
– Then someone said feminism is just another way to say “I can’t buy a fucking date” and we all went back to desperate housewives.
If you’re rolling with Firefox, there’s a plugin that will Tiny URL a page for you with a right click. That shit rocks.
I sorta agree feets, there are rules about airing dirty laundry. On the other hand, as someone whose father was nearly as douchey as AW apparently was/is, I make it a point to respectfully stand off to the side when someone unloads that kind of psychic baggage. There’s some serious pain there, inflicted by a selfish adult on a child. The specifics of their relationship are almost meaningless, but the hurt is palpable.
Whether it’s appropriate or not, I make it a point to respect that kind of story.
Wait, didn’t Zucker pull his shit together? I thought he’d fit in here.
Oh, and my best (OK, only) nephew is bi-racial, and a more handsome young man you will never find.
Despite being pissed off that Dan beat me to this, I’ll add that Walker also popularized the phrase “We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” which has been taken up by Religious Left leaders like Jim Wallis and is now a slogan of O!
“Phoebe Katz is Jewish, Chinese, and Filipina.”
Yeah okay, so where does the ‘miscegenation’ come in?
Ah, David Zucker.
– I wonder if Walker will confess her mental illness to her daughter on her death bed.
I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters – a happy family.
I would say the “I am my own woman” part is what really matters. For men, too. It breaks my heart to see the dogmatic meat grinder modern feminism has become.
#13 “alga”
It has more commonly used letters than “kelp,” though the latter is not unheard of.
[Said she who writes/edits crossword clues as a hobby.]
Oh. I’m not all that judgey. It’s just awkward. The first time I clicked got to the oh this is none pof my business part and bailed, but after y’all said it was moving and affecting I clicked back and read it and I’m not sure if it’s her or her editor but there was a for real detectable strain of telling the audience what it wants to hear in that. psycho could explain I think.
That Zadie Smith, she does this thing where she begs and wheedles in this obnoxious promo for one of the local NPR stations and I just figure I might as well obliquely hate her.
There’s just something intolerable and creepy about hearing British women beg for money.
You mean in a plummy accent, right? Because in other British accents it might sound kind of sexy.
Yes! That’s it. Sort of plummy with a pout. It’s really loathsome.
Sorry, but if someone is that much of an asshole to their kids, they deserve to have that exposed to the public, no matter how embarrassing it is. Way too many people like Walker put on a phony front (for instance, the whole “women are sisters” bullshit), and it’s good for everyone to know that they are really worthless human beings.
Children are millstones around the neck, so it takes a village to raise a child. But make sure everyone in the village knows about the millstone thing so no more are made. No more millstones, no more village. More trees, more polar bears, more mosquitoes. Human race gone, Earth perfect as God intended. If God weren’t a creation of the village, that is.
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS!!!1one!!eleven!!
Alice Walker apparently has more affection for Osama Bin Laden and Mumia Abu-Jamal than she has for her own daughter.
How pathetic is this woman?
If a parent is a genuine Ass-hole then they are a genuine Ass-hole and all genuine Ass-holes should be exposed
Now that is a beautiful woman. Marvelous photo, too. She appears to have taken her vicissitudes and conquered them to build a strong character. Very impressive.
Sorry, but TCP is lousy. It’s filled with trite, lousy ideas. The only reason it ever got anywhere is because it’s fashionable nonsense.
Meeting Alice Walker was such a disappointment to me. I could feel the crazy flowing outward from her in big wet waves. And then she started talking.
What a deranged bitch. SO glad her daughter has managed to get out from under the big stone(headed) icon that is Alice “Sister” Walker.
How are the girls over at pandagon and feministe responding to these revelations?