She was scheduled to take the bar exam at the end of July, but decided not to. “My experience as a writer has been useful,” she observed in a job application, “for it has helped me to see the law, fundamentally, as a means for people to tell their stories.” She recently graduated from the Northwestern University School of Law, the law appealing to her largely for its narrative possibilities. Her second book, I Love My Hair!, written for children, appeared last February. Tarpley began her first book, the anthology Testimony: Young African Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity, while she was an undergrad at Harvard. Natasha Anastasia Tarpley–her mother was reading Russian novels during the pregnancy–speaks tentatively of journalism, her choice for the immediate future but not yet a significant part of her life. “I wasn’t trying to transcend history, but to use history to figure out what my own life was.”
I wanted to explore those silences.” Looking for her own reflection in the lives of the women from whom she was descended, she let conjecture lead her as well as facts. I used what I learned about them.” Even so, she said, “I took a lot of liberties. “I was able to speak to my grandmother at length before she died. In Girl in the Mirror, Tarpley’s first person wanders audaciously. She was trying to find a relationship, as well as to be fulfilled in her own self.”
Her grandfather “wanted his own business, his own career, and I could strongly relate to that as a writer.” Iona Jackson, abandoned by the charming idler she’d married, “was someone I connected to in a lot of ways. “I didn’t know either of those people,” she told me, but she recognized herself in the stories she heard about them. In addition, she briefly becomes a grandfather who died when she was a baby and a family friend murdered long before she was born. Tarpley speaks in the voices of her late grandmother, who migrated from Alabama to Chicago as a young woman, and her mother, who was raised here, as well as in her own. These great themes condensed into a series of snapshots set securely in time and place–“the book that was beneath all the rubble.” She had something in mind vast and amorphous: African-American history in general and somewhere within it a history of her family. The 27-year-old author took two years off between her first and second years of law school to think through the book she wanted to write. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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