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Notes on My Gentrification
Penguin
February 2007
On Sale: February 15, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 1594201099
EAN: 9781594201097
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
An extraordinary young writer's search for authenticity
among the various communities of identity-black, Latino,
techno-utopian, Ivy League, activist-competing for her
allegiance, each with its distinct allures and perils. California saved Caille Millner's parents, or at least saved
them from lives of poverty and oppression as black Americans
growing up in racially benighted backwaters. It provided
them with a free education and opportunities for advancement
into the solid middle class and even beyond. But it did its
damage too, and to the young Caille Millner as well, growing
up in a Latino neighborhood in San Jose, relocating to more
affluent but quietly hostile white-bread Silicon Valley
suburbs being transformed out of all recognition by boom
times, and then fleeing to a succession of utopian
communities that in the end proved to be no less messy than
the places she left behind. The Golden Road is Caille
Millner's frankly wonderful memoir of coming of age in a
world in which the need for a stable identity and the need
to embrace radical change all too often collide, with
consequences at times hilarious and at times devastating. Caille Millner is equally familiar with the high-stress
world of teenage strivers' gaming the system, obsessed with
college choice, and the world-nearby geographically but
impossibly far away by any other measure-of kids trapped in
an entrenched underclass who don't have the first idea what
that game even is or how one gets on the playing field.
Throughout The Golden Road, Millner navigates from one world
to the other with breathtaking ease, always the outsider but
always genuinely struggling for empathy and connection. The
result is a book that tours the landscapes of possibility
carved by race, class, and culture for young Americans, and
reckons with the prevailing fantasies and realities of
internal immigration and gentrification, through the prism
of her own experiences, with electrifying freshness and
lucidity. This is that rare thing, a memoir that transcends
its author's personal experiences to say something important
and new about the broader culture without losing traction
with the human story that gives it its astonishing power.
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