12/06/2021
LaPointe, a Coast Salish poet and artist, sifts through her family’s lineage to reckon with the meaning of home in this stirring debut. A descendant of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribe in Washington State, LaPointe writes in lucid vignettes that alternate between past and present as she reflects on her ancestors, Salish medicine workers who “faced violence, disease, and genocide”; her nomadic upbringing with her parents in the 1980s; and her romantic relationships in her 30s. Amid shifting landscapes—from the Swinomish Reservation to homelessness in her teens—she discovered punk music, which became a lifelong fascination (“To hear... a shrieking, guttural scream felt like being in the presence of power”) and the conduit to meeting her two love interests: her childhood boyfriend and her husband. While LaPointe’s prose falls flat when charting the love triangle that ensued between the three of them (“Being with him felt like picking up where we left off”), her writing radiates elsewhere—including in a story of her ancestor Comptia, one of the only Chinook Indians to survive a smallpox epidemic. She also displays immense vulnerability when discussing her sexual assaults, and how, through her “own ritual of healing,” she resisted being defined by them. LaPointe’s fresh and urgent perspective on Indigenous culture is enthralling. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi, Inc. (Mar.)
Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award
A NPR Best Book of the Year
A BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A NYLON Must-Read Book of the Month
Named a Most Anticipated Book by NYLON, Bustle, Electric Lit, Ms., BookPage, and The Millions
"When Sasha LaPointe isn’t singing in punk bands, she’s writing about her life as an Indigenous person of Upper Skagit and Nooksack lineage, which has culminated beautifully in her debut memoir . . . A gripping read that sheds fresh light on what it means to be both punk and Indigenous in America." —Jason Heller, A NPR Best Book of the Year
"Absorbing . . . a worthy tribute to Coast Salish women." —TIME
"Sasha’s compelling personal story, the story of her maternal ancestors and the lands they have inhabited are inextricably linked in this memoir. This is essential reading for those of us who now live on what was once, completely, the territory of Coast Salish people." —The Seattle Times
"LaPointe recounts the interconnected stories of her life and the lives of some of her ancestors as Coast Salish women living in different time periods on their ancestral lands. These simultaneous threads capture resilience, trauma, love, healing, and connection . . . Her work is definitely something to be watched." —Sarah Neilson, Shondaland
"The Pacific-Northwest native's story is one of survival . . . LaPointe reckons with a fraught past by weaving together memoir and poetry to create something that feels raw and unfiltered." —Shannon Carlin, Bust
"[A] poetically punk debut memoir about ancestry, loss, colonialism, rebuilding, power, hope and healing." —Karla Strand, Ms.
"A beautiful story about lineage, love, and what it means to reclaim one’s life." —Laura Schmitt, Electric Literature
"Set against a backdrop of of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with persona traumas amplified by the collective personal traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal." —Shelf Unbound
"Red Paint offers a poetic narrative of trauma and healing through ancestral rites and punk rock, both of which prove to be potent medicine during LaPointe’s excavation of family legacy and matrilineal power . . . LaPointe’s quest to wear the red paint of her ancestors in the context of her own life as a poet and performer integrates the twin strands, past and present, of this stunning memoir. For LaPointe, restoring the self to health is entwined with restoring Native women’s voices that have been erased throughout history. She uses her own luminescent voice to tell their stories, wielding language, words, ritual and community as tools of contemporary and ancestral healing." —Catherine Hollis, Bookpage
"In Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe delivers a cutting, artful thrashing of settler colonialism and a sensitive exploration of ways of healing and forging space for community and connection through storytelling . . . LaPointe's intimate prose is introspective, raging and funny . . . [She] explores her experiences and familial legacies in a wash of rage, beauty, love and reclamation of strength via storytelling." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"Throughout [Red Paint], the author deftly navigates multiple timelines, weaving in and out of family history, personal narrative, and a host of other tangential topics . . . Although the author does not shy away from heartache and sorrow, readers are welcomed on what is ultimately a healing journey that will stick in their memories. An engaging, poetic, educative examination of the search for home and personal and cultural identity." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] stirring debut . . . LaPointe writes in lucid vignettes that alternate between past and present as she reflects on her ancestors, Salish medicine workers who 'faced violence, disease, and genocide' . . . LaPointe’s fresh and urgent perspective on Indigenous culture is enthralling." —Publishers Weekly
"Red Paint is an ode to healing and to healers, told by someone who intimately knows both. Steeped in punk music and poetry, it is an ode to indigenous inheritance, and to the work and wisdom necessary to recover from the legacies of trauma. It is the truest kind of love story: one in which every lover is a MacGuffin, propelling its narrator toward the person who matters most—herself." —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
“Red Paint is a miraculous book. Sasha LaPointe walks us through the sites of her evisceration while rebuilding a home within her body using sturdy materials: rose quartz, cedar bark, red clay, and the words of her ancestors. With each potent sentence, she shows us what access to power looks like. She shows us how to become whole.” —Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic
"As luminous as the morning sun over the fir forests, Red Paint is a story of where strength takes us. Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe goes looking to the past to help heal from terrible traumas, finding inspiration in her ancestors, the Salish people. This is a book destined to be a classic. Read it." —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder
10/01/2021
With In Love, NBA/NBCC finalist Bloom (White Houses) takes us on a painful journey as her husband retires from his job, withdraws from life, and finally receives a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's; she recalls both the love they experienced and the love it took to stand by him as he ended his life on his own terms. In The Beauty of Dusk, New York Times columnist Bruni contemplates aging, illness, and the end of the road as he describes a rare stroke that deprived him of sight in his right eye, even as he learns that he could lose sight in his left eye as well. In Aurelia, Aurélia, Lannan Literary Award-winning novelist Davis (The Silk Road) considers how living and imagining interact in a book grounded in the joys and troubles of her marriage and her husband's recent death. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Jewish household and married off at age 19 to a man she barely knew, Haart made a Brazen decision more than two decades later, surreptitiously earning enough money to break away, then entering the fashion world, and finally becoming CEO and co-owner of the modeling agency Elite World Group. Adding to all those paw-poundingly wonderful canine celebrations that keep coming our way, And a Dog Called Fig is Dublin IMPAC long-listed Canadian novelist Humphreys's paean to dogs as the ideal companion to the writing life. In The Tears of a Man Flow Inward, Burundi-born, U.S.-based Pushcart/Whiting honoree Irankunda recalls how his family and fellow villagers survived the 13-year civil war in his country—with the help, crucially, of his kind and brave mother, a Mushingantahe, or chosen village leader—and how the war destroyed Burundi's culture and traditions. As private investigator Krouse explains in Tell Me Everything, she accepted a case of alleged sexual assault at a party for college football players and recruits despite reservations owing to her own experiences with sexual violence, then saw the case become a landmark civil rights case. In Red Paint, LaPointe, a Salish poet and nonfiction author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes, explains how she has sought to reclaim a place in the world for herself and her people by blending her passion for the punk rock of the Pacific Northwest and her desire to honor spiritual traditions and particularly a namesake great-grandmother who fought to preserve the Lushootseed language. Undoubtedly, book critic Newton has Ancestor Trouble: a forebear accused of witchcraft in Puritan Massachusetts, a grandfather married 13 times, a father who praised slavery and obsessed over the purity of his bloodlines, and a frantic, cat-rescuing mother who performed exorcisms, all of which made her wonder how she would turn out. In How Do I Un-Remember This? comedian/screenwriter Pellegrino draws on his big-hit podcast Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino (over 13.5 million downloads in 2020) as he renegotiates 1990s pop culture and moments funny, embarrassing, or painful to limn growing up closeted in a conservative Ohio community. In Black Ops, Prado portrays a life that ranges from his family's fleeing the Cuban revolution when he was seven to his retirement from the CIA as the equivalent of a two-star general while also detailing the agency's involvement over the decades in numerous "shadow wars" (200,000-copy first printing). Segall came of age as a reporter just as tech entrepreneurs began to soar, and as she interviewed these Special Characters, she also rose to become an award-winning investigative reporter and (until 2019) CNN's senior tech correspondent (75,000-copy first printing).
★ 2021-12-24
A punk-infused memoir by a Coast Salish woman about her connection to her heritage.
Beginning with a poem, a story from her family’s history, and a description of what the book is and is not—“what happens in the longhouse is not what this story is about, but this is a story about healing”—LaPointe shifts back and forth between her own story and those of her family, specifically her great-grandmother and an ancestor who lost her own family to smallpox. Throughout the book, the author deftly navigates multiple timelines, weaving in and out of family history, personal narrative, and a host of other tangential topics: the Washington music scene, her love of Twin Peaks, a show “heavy with dark and supernatural themes, often terrifying, and along with Nirvana, responsible for putting this rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest on the map.” The author connects concepts of home across generations, especially great-grandmother’s recollections of moving throughout her childhood: “‘My mother traveled with a rolled-up piece of linoleum,’ she’d recall warmly. ‘No matter where we were, she’d lay it down, she’d create home wherever she could.’ ” The image of linoleum as home reoccurs, tying into LaPointe’s discussion of her experience with teenage homelessness, while also expanding the concept of home to include that of her people historically. “My Family, my tribe, my ancestors, we were something temporary to the settlers,” she writes. “Something that would eventually go away. Whether by disease or alcohol or poverty, our genocide was inevitable to them. I looked at the smoke pluming from the metal chimneys of the small reservation houses along the highway. But here we were, existing in our impermanent homes.” Although the author does not shy away from heartache and sorrow, readers are welcomed on what is ultimately a healing journey that will stick in their memories.
An engaging, poetic, educative examination of the search for home and personal and cultural identity.
She voices her coming-of-age memoir in soft, melodic tones while recounting a nomadic childhood full of identity conflict…This is a unique memoir, told in warm, intimate tones that will have listeners rooting all the harder for a young woman to find her place in the world.”
A worthy tribute to Coast Salish women.”
