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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

When Danielle Evans’s short story “Virgins” was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a bold new voice. Written when she was only twenty-three, Evans’s story of two black, blue-collar fifteen-year-old girls’ flirtation with adulthood for one night was startling in its pitch-perfect examination of race, class, and the shifting terrain of adolescence.

Now this debut collection delivers on the promise of that early story. In “Harvest,” a college student’s unplanned pregnancy forces her to confront her own feelings of inadequacy in comparison to her white classmates. In “Jellyfish,” a father’s misguided attempt to rescue a gift for his grown daughter from an apartment collapse magnifies all he doesn’t know about her. And in “Snakes,” the mixed-race daughter of intellectuals recounts the disastrous summer she spent with her white grandmother and cousin, a summer that has unforeseen repercussions in the present.

Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one’s sense of identity and the choices one makes.

“Danielle Evans’s whipsmart first story collection charts the liminal years between childhood and the condition dubiously known as being a grown-up… Fiercely independent, all of Evans’s characters struggle for a place in a world intent of fencing them out. But as her title suggests, the biggest obstacles they face are often their own selves.”
–New York Times Book Review

“Danielle Evans’ blisteringly smart short stories offer fresh perspective on being young and black in America. From a vandalizing valedictorian to a rejected biracial child, her characters triumph by surviving without forgetting.”
–Time

“Stories about the trade-offs of early adulthood from a new writer with a fresh, appealing voice… Many of these eight wonderfully melancholy stories mostly set along the East Coast deal with loss-of family, of love, of innocence-and all explore the chasm between what others see and who we really are…Most of Evans’ characters are African American, but she doesn’t dwell on race, focusing instead on the transitory awkwardness inherent in young adulthood. Readers will understand her characters’ mistakes long before they’ve been made-and recognize that when we have to choose, it is rarely our better selves who win.”
–People (4 stars)

“The most vivid characters in Danielle Evans’s story collection are in- betweeners: between girlhood and womanhood; between the black middle class and Ivy League privilege; between iffy boyfriends and those even less reliable; between an extended family and living on your own. To say they’re caught between worlds isn’t quite accurate, though; they tend to be hard-headed, sadder but wiser and, most of all, funny.”
–The New York Times

“This striking debut collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self offers rich slices of African-American life… [Evans’s] stories are bolstered by memorable images… Evans’s book, meanwhile, carries a strong scent of freshness and promise.”
–Entertainment Weekly