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A Family Memoir
Simon & Schuster
October 2011
On Sale: October 18, 2011
368 pages
ISBN: 1451627548
EAN: 9781451627541
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and
personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist,
sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents,
a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and
arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that
shaped their lives—and his own. His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of
slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from
Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of
Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II
refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped
hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They
met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she
was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for
more than a year before marrying and having two boys.
Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed
by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with
self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her
sons by herself, and his father spiraled into an alcoholic
descent that destroyed his once meteoric career. Based on extensive interviews and documentary research as
well as his own personal recollections and insights, My Long
Trip Home is a reporter’s search for the factual and
emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family, a
successful adult’s exploration of how he rose from a
turbulent childhood to a groundbreaking career, and,
ultimately, a son’s haunting meditation on the nature of
love, loss, identity, and forgiveness.
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