I'm Down (Wolff)

I'm Down: A Memoir
Misha Wolff, 2009
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312378554

In Brief
Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black.  “He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson.  You couldn’t tell my father he was white.  Believe me, I tried,” writes Wolff.  And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter Down. 

Unfortunately, Mishna didn’t quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team.  She was shy, uncool and painfully white.  And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too “black” to fit in with her white classmates. 

I’m Down is a hip, hysterical and at the same time beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black and white in America. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 

Mishna Wolff is a comedian and former model who grew up in Seattle. She divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles.  (From the publisher.)

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Critics Say . . . 
It is that complicated human dynamic—of being white in a black world—that Mishna Wolff describes in her memoir I'm Down, a tale of coming of age in south Seattle under the tutelage of John Wolff, her father. John hung around black people, had black girlfriends and married a black woman. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Foxx, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson," Wolff writes. One admires any child who gets through a difficult childhood; the reading of such a chronicle, if told well, can be arresting. But, unfortunately, little of dramatic interest happens in the life of young Mishna.... In her effort to explain what it was like living around blacks, Wolff too often comes close to mimicking a tired TV sitcom. Even though she writes, "I claim none of this as gospel. That being said, most of this stuff is totally true," long riffs of quoted dialogue beg suspicion and begin to grate.
Wil Haygood - Washington Post

As she tells you at the outset of I’m Down, Mishna Wolff is all white—nothing remarkable, except that her way cool father, “Wolfy,” thinks he’s black (he’s not).  What follows is a funny-melancholy coming of age memoir [in which] Mishna searches for identity in her broken home, her snobby, mostly white prep school, and—most restrictive of all—her longing heart.
O, Oprah's Magazine

An authentically funny, truly transcendent work that makes other, sorry-voiced memoirs by a certain more privileged class of writer pale—pun intended—by comparison...Wolff’s focus, and the sweet soul of this terrific book, was on being accepted by her streetwise, wiseass dad, whom she knew loved her—and whom she loved—unequivocally.
Elle Magazine

This buoyant memoir is rich in detail but never feels over embellished…I’m Down certainly has serious thoughts on its mind (Wolff actually grew up quite poor and hungry), but the tone manages to be light and triumphant because of the hilarious child-goggles Wolff wears while spinning her tales. Rating: A
Entertainment Weekly

Humorist and former model Wolff details her childhood growing up in an all-black Seattle neighborhood with a white father who wanted to be black in this amusing memoir. Wolff never quite fit in with the neighborhood kids, despite her father's urgings that she make friends with the "sisters" on the block. Her father was raised in a similar neighborhood and-after a brief stint as a hippie in Vermont-returned to Seattle and settled into life as a self-proclaimed black man. Wolff and her younger, more outgoing sister, Anora, are taught to embrace all things black, just like their father and his string of black girlfriends. Just as Wolff finds her footing in the local elementary school (after having mastered the art of "capping": think "yo mama" jokes), her mother, recently divorced from her father and living as a Buddhist, decides to enroll Wolff in the Individual Progress Program, a school for gifted children. Once again, Wolff finds herself the outcast among the wealthy white kids who own horses and take lavish vacations. While Wolff is adept at balancing humorous memories with more poignant moments of a daughter trying to earn her father's admiration, the result is more a series of vignettes than a cohesive memoir.
Publishers Weekly

In a memoir that is frequently hilarious, occasionally terrifying, and ultimately bittersweet, Wolff forces readers to consider whether racial identity is the result of nature, derived through nurture, or constructed and reconstructed throughout life. The author was born to white parents and raised into early adolescence mostly by her father, a man who worked harder to remake his own and his children's identities as black than he did at earning a living. From early childhood she tried hard to sort through evidence of her own sense of self and belonging: rougher kids in their working-class black Seattle neighborhood rejected her while adoring her younger (equally white) sister; other black kids accepted her as an equal or pitied her confusion; her father's second wife (black) rejected her cruelly; and her mother was willing to take her in but not to confront her former husband's careless child rearing. When her mother enrolled her in a public school program for intellectually gifted children, Wolff had to accommodate her worldview to take into account her classmates' relative wealth and mindless racism. Father and daughter eventually found a bridge through sports, but this rapprochement was made possible as much by the author's maturing emotional health as by her father's realization that he risked losing her. Wolff writes fluidly and offers moments of great insight through story rather than through explanation, making it easy for readers to engage with the child's questions and growing frustrations. An excellent choice for discussion in ethnic identity curricula, but absorbing reading, too. —Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
School Library Journal

A humorist and former model recalls growing up gifted and white in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood. In the early 1970s, Wolff and her parents, all Caucasian, moved back to her father's childhood neighborhood, Rainier Valley in south Seattle. The neighborhood had changed from white to black, and her father decided that the family should be black too. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol," writes the author, "telling jokes like Redd Fox and giving advice like Jesse Jackson." Wolff's mother soon tired of the project and divorced her father. At age seven or eight, Wolff says, she was terrible at acting black, and she became a source of constant irritation and disappointment to her father. She could not dance, sing or even jump rope, and she displayed weakness in a tough neighborhood. Just as she discovered she was good at something black-rapid-fire insults along the lines of "Your mama's so fat ... " or "You're so ugly ... "—her mother transferred her to a school for gifted children (all of them white and rich). So started Wolff's perilous journey of self-identity. The blackness of her neighborhood only made her feel out of place at school, and the whiteness of her school only alienated her from her father and the black woman he married, to the point where she moved out to live with her mother. By age 12 she was a mess, suffering from insomnia, migraines and a deep anxiety that she would always be poor and never have "a lucrative anesthesia practice like all my friends." Over time, Wolff found some balance. Even her father, in a lovingly told final episode, gave her what she most wanted—his acceptance. Deftly and hilariously delineates the American drama of race and class for one little girl.
Kirkus Reviews

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for I'm Down: 

1. What makes John Wolff, a white man, so desirous of living in a black world that he adopts its lingo, dress, and philosophy? What did his black friends make of him?

2. Mishna describes her father as "strutt[ing] around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Foxx, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson." Do you find Wolff's stereotyping of African-American culture degrading—or a naive attempt to adopt a culture he admires? What about his accusation that Mishna felt better than others because she was considered intellectually gifted—is that playing into both class and race stereotypes?

2. Overall, what do you think of John Wolff? Do you find him admirable, funny, endearing, or irritating? What would it be like, for you personally, to be his child...or his wife?

3. Why is Mishna so desperate for her father's approval? What do you think of his parenting style? What part does her stepmother play in the family dynamics?

4. Talk about the ways in which Mishna struggled to find acceptance—in her black neighborhood and in the all-white school her mother sent her to. Which was more difficult—in which place did she find more bullying or taunting? Was her mother right to pluck her out of her environment and sending her to the school?

5. Overall, did you find this book "hilarious" as its promotional blurbs proclaim? If so, which parts were particularly funny? Or did you find the book more bitter-sweet, even painful at times?

6. This book is a struggle for identity. In what way, does Mishna finally come to accept who she is?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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