The Book Keeper

A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy

By: Julia McKenzie Munemo

Narrated by: Julia McKenzie Munemo

When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she - a White woman - had been married to a Black man for six years, and their first son was a toddler.

Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn”, she hid the books from herself and from her growing mixed-race family for more than a decade.

But then, with police shootings of African American men more and more in the public eye, she realized that understanding her own legacy was the only way to begin to understand her country.

©2020 Swallow Press (P)2020 Julia McKenzie Munemo

Timely and Timeless

“White privilege swallows us whole,” writes Julia McKenzie Munemo in this gorgeous memoir that explores all that we inherit and all that we might choose. With curiosity and courage, Munemo seeks out details from her father’s life, including details from his painful career writing exploitive pulp fiction.
Munemo’s sentences wend with a fierce poeticism that invites her readers in to not only probe difficult truths, but to join her in loving her interracial family. Munemo’s story is deeply personal, raw, and honest, and it’s through this route that Munemo manages to include us all. Indeed, Munemo achieves the universal as she risks the path best articulated by Anne Lamott who celebrates writers willing to journey “straight into the emotional center of things. [Who write] toward vulnerability [and] risk being unliked.”
Munemo rushes straight into the complex center and risks the pursuit of clarity, risks finding herself, her father, her husband and children. She makes available her talent and love to her readers, and as a result, we become privy to real moments of insight and clarity, urgent spaces of epiphany that exist inside the messy reality of privilege, shame, loss, and, of course, love.

Deeply moving

A deeply moving, beautifully written memoir. So thoughtful, surprising and engaging. I couldn’t stop listening. Wonderful.

Beautifully Written and Told

A woman’s quest to learn more about her father and what his legacy means to her. The story is relevant and honestly told. The author narrates the story well.