Essays
I Inherited Great Book Taste: Bridging Generations with Stories
Culture content creator Gabby Whiten shares how reading stories by and about Black women create intergenerational bonds.
Gabby Whiten is a fashion, beauty, and pop culture content creator living in New York City. Gabby writes The Weekly, a collection of reviews, recommendations, and quippy commentary covering a wide range of topics including books, music, film/tv, style, and makeup. Each edition is delivered in a “mini magazine”-style graphic combining her love for the lifestyle glossies of the 2000s with the dynamics of the internet. Gabby is also a recent graduate from the NYU School of Medicine’s Biomedical Sciences doctoral program, where she studied iron metabolism degeneration. She loves analyzing trends in fashion, beauty, and pop culture through a data and research driven perspective. She would describe herself as a romance sun, thriller moon, and lit fic rising. You can find Gabby on Instagram.
I used to constantly badger my mom for the gold jumbo sequin shoulder bag from Limited Too and/or an after-school jaunt to the local library. In retrospect, I must have known these were the two things I knew she couldn’t resist: self-expression through style and a gripping new novel bursting with promise of a new world to explore.
In elementary school, I was a voracious reader. The two-story suburban book emporium (aka the Chesapeake Central Library) was my mecca. “You should try this series!”, Mom whispered to me from two stacks down. From then on, Nancy Drew and I were constantly off solving mysteries. If you’re wondering where one could get great book recommendations before the advent of the “Popular on BookTok” table, the answer was always Mom! While I would spend (what felt like) hours perusing the stacks, I always found myself back in the same spot.
As I grew more comfortable using the library catalog system, I took an independent approach to finding my next read: the peril of the Baudelaire siblings hooked me from page one and Sarah Dessen’s coming-of-age Carolina summer stories were in my hands on publication day. What probably started as evaluating my reading comprehension skills eventually turned into genuine discourse about the newest young adult science fiction/fantasy series (and which pairing in the love triangle was #endgame).
Now, our shared taste in literature mirrors the stories my late great-grandmother would share about my grandma and her sisters growing up in the country towns outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After devouring The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, I knew the suspenseful story of twin sisters and their disparate journeys of self-discovery would be going to the top of “Books to Lend to Mom”. It was kismet, but not surprising that we both arrived at family vacation raving about Kin, a novel that explores the complexity of mother-daughter relationships with rich prose and storytelling.
The shared exploration of literature, specifically novels written by Black women, has led us to a rotating roster of top-tier reads. Whether it’s the epic fantasy told in Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, the inspiring reflections of former First Lady Michelle Obama in Becoming, and especially in the haunting prose in Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, as well as her Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, Beloved, we’ve jointly experienced some of the most beautiful art put to paper. It’s in these stories that my (good) taste in literature has evolved. At the heart of my desire for reading is entertainment, but deeper still, is an affinity for human complexity and new frontiers.
Reading has expanded my worldview and served as a touchpoint for connecting with my mother even (or especially) in adulthood, miles away from the hallowed halls of my childhood library. This sharing of literature, through the stories of complicated Louisiana women, has allowed mother and daughter to stay connected, always anchored by the exuberance of generations of storied women.
