Pure Flame: A Legacy

An intellectual, personal, and ultimately ferocious reckoning with feminism, family, and motherhood from a celebrated critic



“During one of the texting sessions that became our habit over the period I now think of as both late and early in our relationship, my mother revealed the existence of someone named Janis Jerome.”

So begins Michelle Orange's extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of maternal legacy-in her own family and across a century of seismic change. Jerome, she learns, is one of ...