An acclaimed novelist, memoirist and filmmaker, Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the award-winning memoir The World According to Fannie Davis, which chronicled the life of her entrepreneurial mother. Her second memoir, Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss and Legacy, is a riveting and often heartbreaking portrait of Davis’ beloved older sister.
In Love, Rita’s introduction, Davis reflects on the pivotal role that numbers played in their upbringing in Detroit, where their heroic mother supported the family as a number runner (“the numbers” were an unsanctioned lottery played in Detroit’s Black community). “We understood intuitively that numbers contain energy,” Davis writes, “and if we let them, they provide insight.” Rita’s personal number was four; she was the fourth child, four years older than the author. Rita also died at age 44 from complications with lupus.
Inspired by their sisterhood and Rita’s letters, always signed, “Love, Rita,” Davis tells a compelling story of growing up in 1960s Detroit. While Love, Rita keeps its spotlight on Rita, the memoir encompasses significant moments in the author’s life as well. It’s also a sober reflection on the impact that racism and the medical establishment have on the lives of Black Americans, especially women. Davis seamlessly weaves her family’s narrative with statistics about the ways in which racism and societal trauma impact Black women’s lives and medical outcomes, many of them devastating. For example, Black women with lupus die up to 13 years earlier than white women with the same disease.
Read our interview with Bridgett M. Davis, author of ‘Love, Rita.’
Davis brings a novelist’s sensibility to this homage to her sister, making effective use of the techniques of creative nonfiction storytelling, including dramatic scenes and dialogue. She also mines family treasures, including poignant handwritten letters the young Rita wrote and stuck into the family Bible. The first said, “Dear God, Please stop me from worrying.”
Most of all, readers get to know Rita, a talented young woman who began college at Fisk University at age 16, then earned an MBA and became a special education teacher, a dedicated aunt and devoted friend, and a woman whose life was cut short by a devastating chronic disease. By the end, the reader will come to agree with the words Davis wrote in her sister’s obituary: “Rita was unforgettable.”
