By Michael Miner
The 27-year-old author took two years off between her first and second years of law school to think through the book she wanted to write. She had something in mind vast and amorphous: African-American history in general and somewhere within it a history of her family. These great themes condensed into a series of snapshots set securely in time and place–“the book that was beneath all the rubble.”
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In Girl in the Mirror, Tarpley’s first person wanders audaciously. “I was able to speak to my grandmother at length before she died. I spoke to her sisters. My mom is still here. I used what I learned about them.” Even so, she said, “I took a lot of liberties. There were things that were unspoken. I wanted to explore those silences.” Looking for her own reflection in the lives of the women from whom she was descended, she let conjecture lead her as well as facts. “I wasn’t trying to transcend history, but to use history to figure out what my own life was.”
She was scheduled to take the bar exam at the end of July, but decided not to. “Being in law school was very difficult for me,” she explained. “It was something I did without really knowing why I was doing it. I didn’t have a clear sense of wanting to achieve anything in law. I knew I wasn’t going to practice.”
Can Girl in the Mirror be considered–certainly among many other things–journalism?
“I don’t know,” she mused. “The fact that you’re inventing someone is–like you say–beyond the purview of journalism. You’re supposed to have all your facts right. But at the same time, there’s a value to creating something that speaks to people’s hearts or allows people to see the world through other people’s eyes. I’m not saying you should create a totally fictional piece of work and pass it off as something true and objectively provable. But at the same time, maybe creating characters is the best way to tell the story. I think you can have a basic fact, or basic facts you can build around, and it’s still the same truth. I’m not saying that’s journalism, but maybe it could be. I think there’s room for a lot of different types of work to be done. If you think of journalism as a way to transmit information and provide people with views of the world they might not otherwise have access to, then I think maybe there’s room to be creative about those ways of doing things, and still tell the truth and not make up stuff out of the blue. It’s a disciplined way of writing, but to me there’s a lot of room–there could be room–for different types of voices and styles.”
The odd thing about Rowan’s diminishing presence is that the Sun-Times was his home newspaper. A syndicated columnist and the home newspaper enjoy more than a nominal relationship. The paper provides a base salary and benefits. The columnist contributes occasional stories that don’t work as columns, and also contacts, influence, prestige. Rowan appeared as the senior panelist on Inside Washington representing the Sun-Times, not King Features Syndicate. As a Pulitizer Prize finalist in 1995 for columns exposing corruption in the NAACP, Rowan would have won not only for himself but for his home paper.
