When Rashid is denied parole and ordered to leave the country at the end of his sentence, the author realizes that her dreams for an intact family eventually, are shattered, and she effectively ends their romantic relationship.īut, it is hard. No matter that he is as supportive as possible with phone calls and a real level of interest bandele’s husband is not able to be around to share in the joy or cushion the difficulties. She is mesmerized by the miracle of her daughter and is besotted with motherhood. In other words, how could she not have the child?Įventually, bandele is overwhelmed by the strain that having an absent partner places upon her life. bandele’s and her husband’s love is necessary and, likely, the kind for which all of humanity longs. She confronts the sexual abuse that plagued her childhood for the first time as a result of one of their conversations, which nudges her along on her first steps toward healing and negotiating life as a survivor. As far-fetched as it seems, in both the Prisoner’s Wife and Something Like Beautiful, bandele describes her relationship with Rashid as transformative. She has the baby despite her initial reservations about raising a child while her husband is still imprisoned.īandele fully believes that her husband will soon be paroled, that they will be elevated from the drudgery of metal detectors, prison guards, and collect telephone calls. (The piece was also featured in another form in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” section in 2006.) During one of their conjugal visits, Rashid and bandele become pregnant. In fact, an excerpt from Something Like Beautiful, “Woman Up,” is the second entry in Walker’s anthology. Something Like Beautiful is the counterpoint bearing witness to the dissolution of that union and its physical and emotional aftermath.Īt its core, though, Something Like Beautiful is, like Rebecca Walker’s One Big Happy Family, an anthology exploring how non-conventional families work. The Prisoner’s Wife tells her seemingly improbable love story (bandele, an up-and-coming literary star, falls for and marries Rashid, a man serving a prison sentence of 20 years-to-life for murder). It is the feeling brimming beneath the prose that drives bandele’s writing. In both, bandele tells what feels like a raw, jagged story by wrapping a vast river of emotion tightly around her words. Asha bandele’s latest work, the memoir Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story, reads as a dénouement or coda to her first work of prose published ten years earlier, The Prisoner’s Wife.
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