A memoir and a biography about two women who have changed American politics
Kamala Harris’s memoir opens with a moving family scene. It is the night of Trump’s election, also the night Harris was elected senator for California, and she and her family are gathered for a celebratory meal. Eventually though, the evening becomes one where the group is gathered around the TV watching in horror as the knowledge of Trump’s victory unfolds (“didn’t share a single chip”, she says of the bag of Doritos she made her way through).
At one point in the evening, Harris’s nine-year-old godson approaches the now Vice-President Elect. Tears brimming in his eyes, he asks her to reassure him that “that man” can’t win.
Consoling him, Harris says to the small child, “you know how sometimes superheroes are facing a big challenge because a villain is coming for them? What do they do?”
“They fight back,” the child replies.
“That’s right,” Harris tells him, “so that’s what we’re going to do.” It was, she writes, a “battle for the soul of our nation”.
Originally published in early 2019, the very existence of this book (its paperback was recently published), when announced, was taken by some as a signal of her political intentions, confirmation that she intended to attempt to run in the 2020 presidential election. This is very much the political memoir of someone setting out on the most important part of their career, rather than looking back on it. As such, it lacks the unfettered frankness that a retrospective can enjoy. This is someone setting out their stall, shaping a narrative, with the voters to whom they wish to appeal firmly in their mind’s eye.
As a result, at times, Harris gets in the way of her own eventful back story, when her writing becomes heavy-handed in its efforts to show how her life experience has shaped her into someone worthy of high office. She is, we don’t need to be convinced.
From the off, Harris states that The Truths We Hold is not intended to be a “policy platform, much less a 50-point plan”. It is rather “a collection of ideas and viewpoints and stories, from my life and from the lives of the many people I’ve met along the way”.
It is when Harris gets personal that her writing is most engaging, and most effective in capturing the strength of her own personality. In particular, when she writes about her husband, Douglas Emhoff, and her role as a stepmother (“Momala”, her two stepchildren call her) and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, that the book really comes alive. On such terra firma, Harris entirely forgets the need to link events in her life to her worth as a political candidate, and simply tells the story.
And a fascinating story it is.
The lawyer who would go on to be the first woman of colour from her state to be elected senator, the second in the nation’s history, and to have risen higher in America’s leadership than any previously, Kamala Harris (pronounced comma-la, she points out) was born in Oakland, California in 1964. Her father immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, becoming a teacher of economics at Stanford University. Her mother was born in southern India. A gifted student, Shyamala Gopalan travelled to America, where she knew no one, to a graduate programme at Berkeley at the age of 19, for a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology; she would later become a breast cancer researcher.
Kamala’s parents met at Berkeley, where both were involved in the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, their marriage did not last, and they split up when the eldest of their two daughters was five.
Her father remained part of the girls’ lives, but it was their mother who oversaw their upbringing. Her proud daughter writes “she was extraordinary.” Barely more than five foot tall, Kamala recalls that it felt more like she was six foot two.
Her mother made them feel like they could do anything, instilling in her daughters an awareness of the importance of political activism and civic leadership. Despite her parents’ break-up, this was a happy childhood, in a close-knit community, where emphasis was placed on working hard, supporting your neighbours, and providing a future for your children. During the death throes of the Trump administration, there was a certain comfort to be found in reading articles summing up the CVs of various Biden appointees, and the wealth of experience on show. At times, this book is in part an extended version of this exercise; the difference in the professional depth of experience with social issues that Harris has compared to the restrictive, tunnel visioned conservatism of Pence is staggering. Kamala has, on occasion, been accused of somewhat reshaping the narrative of her time as a prosecutor in order to meet the requirements of the liberal voters to whom she now wishes to appeal. Wherever you stand on the assertions of punitive behaviour which have been levelled at Harris, it’s thrilling to read evidence from someone whose entire life and career has been one of engagement with societal well-being.
The story opens with Kamala beginning an internship in the district attorney’s office in California. She explains her unexpected decision to become a prosecutor in terms of wanting to be on the front lines of criminal justice reform, to “protect the vulnerable”, she writes.
She, a child of protesters, wanted to be on the inside, sitting at the table where the decisions were being made. She went on, of course, to become district attorney of San Francisco, then attorney general and later United States senator for California.
“I knew I represented something much bigger than my own experience,” Harris writes at one point. “I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she famously said upon her election.
Like all good memoirs, it is when Kamala manages to allow her reader to find the universal in her personal story that The Truths We Hold is most compelling.
She, a child of protesters, wanted to be on the inside, sitting at the table where the decisions were being made. She went on to become United States senator for California