In a world increasingly built around convenience, I have found myself falling into the same habits as everyone else. Audiobooks have replaced physical books on many of my long drives back and forth from Martha’s Vineyard to Atlanta. Summaries compete with full stories. Efficiency often wins over experience.
So when I was asked to read and reflect on “The Rough Side of the Mountain” by Keisha Lance Bottoms (Mariner Books, April 2026), I felt two things at once: excitement and intimidation. Not because I don’t love books, but because somewhere along the way I had forgotten how much I love the act of reading them.
Long before podcasts and endless scrolling, my favorite place in the world was the Oak Bluffs Public Library. My Nana and I shared a love of books, but even more than reading them, we loved talking about them. Whether I had spent the afternoon beside her or reading alone at Inkwell Beach, every book eventually found its way back to one conversation — with Nana.
Reading wasn’t simply something we loved. It was one of the ways we loved each other.
As I opened “The Rough Side of the Mountain,” I found myself thinking, Nana would have loved this one. The finest memoirs do more than tell us someone else’s story. They quietly return us to our own.
While “The Rough Side of the Mountain” chronicles an extraordinary public life — from attorney to mayor of Atlanta — it is remarkably uninterested in building a monument to accomplishment. Instead, Bottoms, who is currently running for governor of Georgia, introduces us to the people who shaped her. We meet Keisha the granddaughter before Keisha the mayor. The daughter before the public servant. The young woman learning to navigate grief, identity, marriage, infertility, motherhood, and faith long before she ever steps onto a political stage.
This is not, at its heart, a political memoir. Politics simply becomes one of the many mountains she climbs. At its core, “The Rough Side of the Mountain” is a memoir about becoming.
One of Bottoms’ greatest achievements as a memoirist is her refusal to rewrite the past with the certainty of hindsight. Many memoirs quietly smooth uncertainty into inevitability, allowing readers to believe success was always destined. Bottoms does the opposite. She allows us to sit beside her while nothing is certain.
We witness the daughter trying to understand her father’s incarceration before she knows how that story will shape her. We experience the quiet battle with shame and an eating disorder before healing has a name. We endure years of infertility before motherhood arrives. We experience campaign losses before election victories.
Bottoms never rushes readers toward the ending she already knows. Instead, she trusts us to remain in the waiting. That restraint builds extraordinary trust between writer and reader. Rather than asking us to admire the woman she became, she allows us to love the woman she was still becoming.
The structure of the memoir reflects that same confidence. Bottoms makes a bold structural choice by delaying her own introduction. She begins instead with Georgia, family, church, and generations of inherited stories. Only after readers understand the people and places that formed her does she finally introduce herself. It is a bold literary choice. In doing so, she quietly argues that identity is never created in isolation. Before we can understand who she became, we must first understand who made her possible.
Perhaps no relationship illustrates this more beautifully than her relationship with her father, influential American R and B singer Major Lance. It would have been easy to reduce him to incarceration or addiction — to define him by the hardest chapters of his life. Bottoms refuses.
Instead, she presents him the way so many children know their parents: brilliant and flawed, generous and disappointing, loving and wounded, full of possibility and burdened by choices.
She never asks us to excuse him. She simply asks us to see him fully. This offers something much harder than judgment for the reader: compassion. Throughout the book, Bottoms resists simple heroes and villains. Parents are complicated. Children misunderstand. Marriages evolve. Dreams change. People disappoint us. And somehow, love remains. She writes not from blame, but from understanding.
Throughout the memoir, recurring images quietly gather meaning. The mountain becomes more than hardship — it becomes inheritance. Family photographs become proof that memory deserves preservation. Genealogy becomes an act of reclamation. The beauty salon transforms into sanctuary, community, and classroom, where generations of Black women quietly shape one another’s lives.
Together, these recurring images elevate “The Rough Side of the Mountain” beyond autobiography. They transform it into a meditation on memory, identity, and inheritance. Ahead of our conversation at Islanders Write, I asked Keisha what legacy she hoped readers would remember — not about Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, but about Keisha the daughter, the mother, and the woman.
Her answer became, for me, the emotional center of the entire memoir: “It’s all of our rough edges — not just ourselves, but that of our loved ones — that make us who we are and that sharpen us.”
Later, I asked what writing the memoir had taught her about truth, vulnerability, and freedom. She paused before answering: “Truth, vulnerability, and freedom — they go hand in hand.”
Then she shared something that deeply resonated with me. Writing the memoir, she explained, became an extension of therapy. Sometimes she wrote first and processed later. Other times, therapy gave her the courage to return to the page.
As someone who also wrote a memoir — much of it during chemotherapy at 22 years old — I recognized that every writer’s path toward healing looks different. My own process unfolded in reverse. I wrote long before I was ready to fully understand what I had written.
Listening to Keisha Lance Bottoms describe writing as part of healing reminded me that memoir is never simply an act of remembering. It is, as I noted above, an act of becoming.
Memoirs are not written simply to tell us who someone was. The very best ones remind us who we are.
Keisha Lance Bottoms will be talking about memoir writing with Belle Burden in a conversation moderated by Sarah Kernochan at Islanders Write on July 16, at 4 pm at Featherstone Center for the Arts. islanderswrite.com.
