Margo Jefferson boldly and brilliantly fuses cultural analysis and memoir to probe race, class, family and art.

Taking in the jazz and blues icons whom Jefferson idolised as a child in the 1950s, ideas of what the female body could be – as incarnated by trailblazing Black dancers and athletes – Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy reimagined in the artworks of Kara Walker, white supremacy in the novels of Willa Cather, and more, this breathtakingly eloquent account is both a critique and a vindication of the constructed self.