The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart

The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart (2000) is a collection of short stories, some fictional and others more closely autobiographical, by best-selling author Alice Walker, author of the acclaimed The Color Purple and other novels. The book takes on the subjects of romance, friendship, and passion through the lens both of individual lives with their intricacies, and with an eye toward shifting racial tensions and climates in America since the 1960s.

The first story in Walker's collection, “To My Young Husband,” is the story of a marriage that began joyously and ended in a difficult, volatile mess, as many marriages do. The story, though at its heart about love and the nature of failed marriages, and the impact they have on the lives of both parties after divorce, is also tied closely to the idea of race and racism in the Deep South during the Civil Rights movement. Based on her own experience, Walker writes about her relationship with her husband, a Jewish civil rights lawyer whom she married at a young age and with whom she had her daughter.

Written as a letter to her daughter, the story tracks her relationship in the heart of Civil Rights-era Mississippi and their subsequent move to Brooklyn. The central question of the tale is about the growing distance between her and her husband, who began their relationship desperately and hopelessly in love, and bound together by their principles as well as their shared interests and goals. But as their marriage continued, Walker reflects on the way that their separate experiences – his as a Jewish career man and hers as a young black woman and artist – shaped their perspectives and in many ways alienated them from each other. Despite their growing distance and eventual divorce, Walker calls her marriage “magical,” accepting that despite the end of the relationship and the toll it took on her happiness, she is thankful for what she learned during the ten years they were together.



The remaining twelve stories in the book act as “what-if” spin-offs of the original story. In them, Walker imagines a dozen other couples, as fictional characters, whose experience in love might have followed the same trajectory as hers, or differed considerably. In one story, for instance, main character Orelia rejoins with her husband, John, after a significant period of distance once she learns how to trust him, forgiving him for all past sins. In another, a lesbian narrator struggles in a relationship with her fundamentalist Christian daughter, who ostracizes her own child and encourages others in her community to do the same. In a third story, a few old women reflect on their experiences with sex after watching a screening of the movie Deep Throat. The women struggle to find their own truths about sex, and to be entirely honest with each other, despite their close relationship.

However, these stories don't only deal with love or its lack. They are also, at their core, a reflection of the ever-changing racial tensions in American life, and are born from the central tensions of Walker's marriage – the difference in race between herself and her husband. In one story, for instance, a black character eats watermelon without thinking, and a few bites in begins to reflect on the shame that a huge percentage of black people felt about eating watermelon, which she no longer feels. She reflects quite explicitly on the way that racial bias, tension, and stereotypes have changed over the years. Walker takes this to new levels when she writes about the differences between relationships and racial tensions through the centuries, with some stories taking place in a historical past while others remain quite contemporary.

At the heart of Walker's collection is the idea that love is a way forward through racial discrimination and bias in American culture – she talks about the sexual relationships of interracial couples and lovers in a way that suggests a kind of political, sexual healing is possible, and a step toward a more inclusive and accepting future. At the same time, Walker admits that these relationships are fraught with their own kinds of complicated tensions, as is clear in the story with the lesbian narrator, who struggles to find acceptance even in the environment in which she was raised. Overall, Walker's collection is a hopeful but honest one about the many kinds of love and relationships that shape and have shaped the lives of Americans since we arrived in the New World.



Alice Walker is a novelist, poet, and Civil Rights activist. She won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her best-selling novel The Color Purple. A renowned feminist and pioneer in the idea of intersectional feminism, she coined the term “womanist,” meaning a specific brand of feminism that included women of color. She also spoke out about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, issues of Anti-Semitism, and more recently showed support for Chelsea Manning, a soldier and activist imprisoned for releasing classified government information through Wikileaks in 2013.