Joan Steinau Lester

Mama’s Child

Joan Steinau Lester grew up working class in New England, yet with her love for smoking French cigarettes, she said she felt at least superficially sophisticated. Despite playing truant in school, she was an excellent student, and skipped a grade to enter college early.

From Mama’s Child:

“Her legs had grown so long, so fast—at five-foot-seven she was nearly my height—that every pair of pants she owned were high-water… These days she’d turned mercurial: one moment she was beaming at me, the next I had to grill her to get one scrap of information.”

In 1962, at nineteen, she fell in love with an African American scholar and writer. Her family disapproved, so she ran away to New York City and six months later they were married—interracial marriage was illegal in twenty-seven states—and later had two children. Lester cited Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, published that year, as the book that most influenced her writing. Though she had always considered herself a writer, her only writing while raising kids and editing her husband’s work was a journal she kept.

Eventually she divorced her husband and, in 1981, met her longtime partner, Carole Johnson, whom she married in 2008. Lester had begun writing in major news outlets, and a publisher suggested compiling a collection of those pieces, published in 1994 as The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas.

Her second and third books were also non-fiction (Taking Charge and Fire in My Soul, the latter a biography of U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton). Then her own children’s experiences inspired her first novel, Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong, which was then followed in 2013 by Mama’s Child.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong. Nina, a biracial teen whose parents divorce, is stranded in the nowhere land between racial boundaries and the struggle for personal independence.

Chianti Sangria

Lizzie, the mother of Ruby Jordan in Mama’s Child, is fond of Chianti.

3 cups Chianti or other fruity red wine

1 cup brandy

1/4 cup orange flavored liqueur (recommended: Triple Sec)

1 orange, sliced

1 lemon, sliced, optional

8 fresh strawberries

Mint

2 cups club soda, chilled

In a large pitcher, combine all ingredients except club soda. Cover tightly and refrigerate 3 hours to let flavors meld. Pour ¾ cup sangria mixture into each of eight wine or lowball glasses, dividing fruit equally. Top each glass with ¼ cup club soda. Serve immediately. Serves 8.