“I need to get my shit.” The word “shit” sounds like “thit” with the cigarette between her teeth. “Ma, Ronny has a restraining order against you.” …a pack of Kool Milds, the O s resembling handcuffs, a cigarette lighter in the shape of a fist flipping a middle finger-she uses the last two, blowing smoke out the window that comes right back in. She throws her worldly possessions on the dash one by one: Chocolate Kiss Victoria Secret lip-gloss, a pair of hoop earrings, a dead iPhone encased in pink fur… “I got to get something from Ronny’s, then take me down Aunt Liza’s.” My mother rifles through the envelope with her name, Shelby Walker, on the front.

But, I’d probably have to pay for that too. I want to peel out of here now, make a mark, tattoo treads over the Spotsylvania County Correctional Facility parking lot. For Coleman, there is ‘no way to escape except to live her own fiction.My mother throws a manila envelope through the car window, gets in slamming the damn door, making my old-baby-Bullet is what I call her, my old-baby Silver Bullet-to rattle like the bag of bones she is. Coleman excavates her personal history, sometimes in stories handed down from past generations, sometimes in DNA results, and she discovers that it’s the act of writing itself that can free her from her family, her guilt, maybe even herself. How to both accept and transcend your past.

How to Sit is, at root, a reflection on how to live. In these stories and essays, she uncovers a paradoxical truth: that sometimes it’s the more difficult things that you can face with surprising bravery and it’s the things that are supposed to come “easy” that are the hardest to learn. “How do you pick your mom up from jail? How do you mourn the death of your grandmother, who was both a powerfully seductive and vital force in your life, but at the same time, awful and tragic? How do you wait three months for your premature twin babies to get out of the NICU without going mad from fear and guilt? With a strong voice that is at times sparse and direct, at other times poetic and knowing, Tyrese Coleman confronts these and other questions in this beautiful debut collection, How to Sit. The worst scars and stitches can come from what we do to ourselves.' 'A bold, unflinching look at guilt, regret, and longing, How to Sit reminds us that sometimes it's not the wounds inflicted by other people that hurt the most. 'A vibrant collection merging story and essay, fact and fiction, Coleman reveals a self more clearly seen when it's written as a character and a writer who knows how to live her own fiction.' Currently a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award.

How to sit by tyrese coleman