Lovely One: A Memoir (2024) by Ketanji Brown Jackson was a completely engrossing and inspiring American story. Justice Jackson credits many things for her success, but the first is the great good fortune of the timing of her birth–in 1970, just at the dawn of the post-civil rights era where the successes that eliminated Jim Crow restrictions were being put into practice.
She reads the audiobook, which I loved, since she included audio files from some of her speeches or from experiences she described, such as a letter one daughter wrote, and a song her other daughter sang at her high school graduation.
If you’re not familiar with her life story, Justice Jackson was born in Washington, DC, to two parents from the Miami area, graduates of HBCUs who had gone to DC to be public school teachers. Her parents later moved back home to Miami, where her father went to night law school while her mother continued teaching and they were near a large extended family. She excelled in school, and went to an integrated large high school in Miami, competing on a national scale in speech and debate, primarily in original oratory. She was accepted to Harvard, and met a group of lifelong women friends there, along with her husband, a white man from a Boston Brahmin family who was headed to Harvard Medical School. She went to Harvard Law School, and they made their relationship work through their various career needs and moves.
She clerked for a federal district and circuit judge right out of law school, and then went to a litigation boutique firm, later clerking for Justice Stephen Breyer, who she eventually replaced on the Supreme Court when he retired.
She and her husband had two daughters, and she describes their struggles with getting an appropriate diagnosis for their older daughter, Talia, who was finally diagnosed as on the autism spectrum when she was 11.
I related to so many aspects of her story–I am only two years older than she is; I didn’t date at all in high school or much in college; and I have a daughter on the autism spectrum who wasn’t diagnosed as a young child when most ASD diagnoses happen. Plus, lawyering is my day job! I highly recommend this memoir if you have any interest in any of those things or just want to read/ listen to a well-told life story.
Plus, I can consider this memoir as fat-positive, even though there is little mention of weight or body size! One of Justice Jackson’s most important mentors was her high school speech and debate coach, Fran Berger. She describes Mrs. Berger neutrally as “a short woman of some girth” who said to her students while admiring her fancy shoes “I’m not ugly, you know. . . . I’m just super-sized.” Mrs. Berger taught her how to construct an argument, reason, and encouraged her development, and gave her a place where it was good to be smart and like to study. And, Justice Jackson doesn’t elsewhere mention body size or shape, or dieting at all in her memoir, which I so appreciated!
I was also fortunate to attend a luncheon and presentation with Justice Jackson in July, sponsored by the Indianapolis Bar Association. She was an engaging and funny speaker!
Reading While Fat 