Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

by Tarana Burke

Overview

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Searing. Powerful. Needed." —Oprah

“Sometimes a single story can change the world. Unbound is one of those stories. Tarana’s words are a testimony to liberation and love.” —Brené Brown

From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words—me too—and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history.

Tarana didn’t always have the courage to say "me too." As a child, she reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess what she thought of as her own sins for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two. One side was the bright, intellectually curious third generation Bronxite steeped in Black literature and power, and the other was the bad, shame ridden girl who thought of herself as a vile rule breaker, not as a victim. She tucked one away, hidden behind a wall of pain and anger, which seemed to work...until it didn’t.

Tarana fought to reunite her fractured self, through organizing, pursuing justice, and finding community. In her debut memoir she shares her extensive work supporting and empowering Black and brown girls, and the devastating realization that to truly help these girls she needed to help that scared, ashamed child still in her soul. She needed to stop running and confront what had happened to her, for Heaven and Diamond and the countless other young Black women for whom she cared. They gave her the courage to embrace her power. A power which in turn she shared with the entire world. Through these young Black and brown women, Tarana found that we can only offer empathy to others if we first offer it to ourselves.

Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman’s inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250621733
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	8,533
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

For more than 25 years, activist, advocate, and author Tarana J. Burke has worked at the intersection of sexual violence and racial justice. Fueled by commitments to interrupt sexual violence and other systemic inequalities disproportionately impacting marginalized people, particularly Black women and girls, Tarana has created and led various campaigns focused on increasing access to resources and support for impacted communities, including the ‘me too.’ Movement, which has galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world, and the me too. International nonprofit organization, founded in 2018. Her New York Times bestselling books You Are Your Best Thing and Unbound have illuminated the power of healing, vulnerability, and storytelling in the movement to end sexual violence.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

No alibi 15

Me too 23

Uptown baby 37

Acts of contrition 45

Breathe again 55

Sunshine and rain 67

Fight the power 75

What shall i give? 87

Indelible 97

Brand new day 109

Sweet home alabama 121

Heaven 137

Hypnotize 161

Another storm 179

Mercy, mercy me 193

Unbound 207

End of the road 225

For colored girls 241

Epilogue 251

Acknowledgments 255

About the author 260

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/28/2021

In this powerful debut, Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, depicts her experiences as a survivor of sexual assault and an advocate for the “necessary work” of collective healing. As a woman who is “hardwired to respond to injustice,” she reflects on her path from being a young, Black girl in the Bronx to becoming a globally recognized activist. “There is no here without where I was,” Burke writes, “stuck and scared and ashamed, a place I remained until the need to care for someone else’s shame saved me too.” In evocative prose, she reflects on the way her trauma fractured her sense of self—“I found space for this secret in the vast cemetery I carried in my soul”—and is equally forthcoming about her moments of courage and uncertainty (“This would be a disaster if it went viral,” she remembers thinking just before she saw her hashtag in “hundreds of thousands of tweets”). Most memorable is the intense love and respect that comes through in her recollections of the young people who have trusted her with their own painful stories. Intensely moving and unapologetically frank, Burke’s fearless memoir will uplift and inspire the next generation of survivors, advocates, and truth-tellers. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

TIME Best Books of 2021
Marie Claire Best Books of 2021
BookPage's Best Books of 2021
LA Times's "The 5 Biggest Nonfiction Books of the Fall"
Kirkus Best of 2021
Library Journal Best Books of 2021

Cosmopolitan's Best Audiobooks of 2021
BookPage's Best Audiobooks of 2021
Audible's Best of 2021
Glamour's Best Audiobooks of 2021

"Searing. Powerful. Needed." —Oprah

“Sometimes a single story can change the world. Unbound is one of those stories. Tarana’s words are a testimony to liberation and love.” —Brené Brown

"Burke sings a Black girl's song and Unbound stands alongside I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Color Purple, as a coming of age story that is at once searingly painful, brilliant, and beautiful. Tarana Burke is known around the world for her activism and leadership. Now she will be known as an extraordinary writer." —Imani Perry, author of Breathe

"Tarana Burke is the most important voice of our generation and Unbound is an offering that will set free hearts, families, and communities. I will never stop being grateful for Tarana Burke’s wisdom and courage - and I will never stop thinking about this book." —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Untamed and founder of Together Rising

"The courageous founder of the #MeToo movement delivers her long-awaited memoir on fighting for justice, equity, and empathy." —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

"Burke's Unbound is worthy of being considered next to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as one of those rare books that will unfold and welcome parts of us we thought we'd completely hid until the earth is gone. Unbound is the one we readers and writers have been waiting for." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

"An unforgettable page-turner of a life story rendered with endless grace and grit." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Intensely moving and unapologetically frank, Burke’s fearless memoir will uplift and inspire the next generation of survivors, advocates, and truth-tellers." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 08/01/2021

With this debut book, Burke writes an important memoir that powerfully illustrates a deeply personal political movement and shows how hashtags and social media can amplify the reiterative yet individual tragedies that are perpetuated by systems and by individuals emboldened by those systems. Burke, the founder of the Me Too movement, specifically describes here how she felt as she watched the movement be co-opted by white women in 2017. The memoir begins with powerful imagery that evokes Maya Angelou's caged bird and ends with an allusion to Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide; Burke here joins in a tradition of poem-prose hybrid memoirs and captures the fragmentary nature of voice as it butts up against structures that would silence it. Burke blends the personal and the political and recounts her upbringing in the Bronx, including her difficulty in school and her experience of sexual violence before she even had the words to describe it; this makes for vital reading. VERDICT Painful and personal, yet beautiful and necessary, this book deserves to be read for its political significance and literary merit. Burke's writing shines when she describes finding her voice as an aspiring activist.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI

Library Journal

★ 2021-06-16
A soul-baring memoir by one the most significant social activists of the past two decades.

By the time the #MeToo hashtag became popularized in 2017, Burke had been at work for more than 10 years building the “me too” movement. Though she sets the record straight as the movement's true founder, she’s less concerned about credit than she is about letting “women, particularly young women of color, know that they are not alone—it’s a movement. It’s beyond a hashtag. It’s the start of a larger conversation and a move­ment for radical community healing.” With empathy at the heart of this movement, Burke offers her own story as a means of helping others. “A dark-skinned Black girl who had been damaged and used,” the author recounts her upbringing in the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s where she was labeled “ugly” and blamed herself for the rape she endured at age 7. Through searing prose and riveting storytelling, Burke lays her trauma bare alongside beautifully rendered moments, such as her discovery, as a high school freshman, of the transformative power of fellow survivor Maya Angelou’s life and art. An honors student known as the “Black Power girl” who challenged racist White teachers, the author went on to become a college activist and then a community organizer in Selma, Alabama. Her intense passion and commitment shine through on every page. Even readers familiar with the story of the Rev. James Bevel—a “giant of the Civil Rights Movement” and known, protected serial child molester—will share Burke’s anger and heartbreak when they crossed paths in Selma. While working with Black girls in Selma, the author discovered that their healing and renewed sense of self-worth were inextricably tied to her own. Burke’s reckoning with her painful past becomes the blueprint for “me too.” Told with candor and deep vulnerability, this story is raw and sobering but also a source of healing and hope for other survivors.

An unforgettable page-turner of a life story rendered with endless grace and grit.

Kirkus Reviews