Letter To My Daughter by Maya Angelou – #ABookADayInMay – Day 17

My village book club chose Letter To My Daughter (2008) by Maya Angelou and it’s handy that it’s 175 pages – indeed, because it is split into 28 short chapters, each of which gets a numbered page announcing it, it’s probably nearer 100 pages of actual text. And I raced through it in about an hour, because it is very easy to consume. What is Letter To My Daughter? Well, first off, it isn’t a letter to Angelou’s daughter – she doesn’t have one. As she explains in a quick preface, ‘I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.’ And then, to be frank, the book is a miscellany of stray thoughts, anecdotes, poetry and life lessons. It is called a collection of essays, but that is a little generous. Some are profound, some are…