Why Evaristo is not just another author
MANIFESTO by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) ★★★✩✩
One of the strangest things about Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker win in
2019 was the way she was treated like a debut author, even though Girl, Woman, Other (joint winner that year with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments) was her eighth novel and she was 60.
The first black woman ever to win the prize, her name was routinely misspelt and even forgotten, as when the BBC told viewers that the prize was won by Atwood and ‘another author’.
Although Evaristo has never sounded anything but grateful for the career boost, you sense it’s part of the point of her new memoir to remind readers that her success was hardly a bolt from the blue.
She takes us back to the racism she encountered as one of eight children in an Anglo-Nigerian household in south London. We run candidly through the lovers, men and women, who wronged her and were wronged by her. And we revisit her creative achievements, from founding Britain’s first black women’s theatre company to the early poetry that segued into the formal breakthroughs of her fiction.
It’s a rousing story but Evaristo’s telling is oddly perfunctory, not least
because of her taste for roboticsounding academese: ‘In this chapter I have explored how my personal development strategies led to me visualising positive outcomes as a way to keep going…’
Still, she’s eye-opening on the hustle and grind of her writing life, with a glint of steel behind the self-helpy bromides, as when she says (perhaps unhealthily) that she works seven days a week without a break.
Yet without the Booker win, Manifesto almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the light in this form. Ultimately it leaves the reader hoping there’s a slower-brewed autobiography to come.