Thoughts on reading Project Girl by Janet McDonald.

Project Girl is the autobiography of Janet McDonald; an African-American woman raised in Brooklyn housing projects, a young and resilient Ivy League educated woman, a trailblazing Parisian lawyer. The memoir eloquently documents the pain and achievement in Janet’s life; neigh a setback nor atrocity unmet by an even greater repose fulled purely by will.

I find it hard to write about Project Girl – there are scarcely parallels between my life and the life of Janet McDonald. Furthermore, the transparent nature in which Ms. McDonald retells her life can be troublesome to read; I had difficulty finishing passages with graphic depictions of heroin use, sexual assault, and debilitating poverty. Yet McDonal’s eternal resilience and strength manages to break though each chapter of bleakness, endowing this memoir with an impossible sense of inspiration and a hopeful spirit. This book was an opportunity for me to hear a story so atypical to my life, an opportunity I greatly cherish.

There is a plethora of important subjects and themes prompted via the reading of Project Girl, but I will limit myself today the drives of those passing though the American Colligate System.

Janet’s depiction of her undergraduate joinery provide a much needed spell to the bouts of introspection brought on by the closure of my time at the University of Illinois.

While the others where in college to be – stockbrokers like their mothers, lawyers like their aunts, or professors like their fathers – I had been told to go to college in order not to be: like my mother or my aunt or my father (58-59).

I have though a lot about what drives the academic passions of myself and my peers. These investigations seem to always revolve around the profession of our parents, and the activated they placed us in as children. Yet Janet’s academic experience is something I have never pondered. I have never before investigated what may drive a person’s academic passions when they have to role academic role model, no guiding star.

As I reflect on Project Girl, I am haunted by the maxim of unity Janet leaves in her epilouge: “We all seek a sense of belonging, a feeling of connection to something, yet each of us wants also to be special. Not an easy feat (229)”