Goldie Taylor Shares 'The Love You Save

Veteran journalist and contributing editor for The Daily Beast, Goldie Taylor, visits us to share her powerful debut memoir, The Love You Save. In her book, she chronicles her difficult childhood, having been raised in East St. Louis by a single mother who worked constantly to make ends meet while she and her two older siblings were left at home for extended periods of time. “My mother didn’t have two nickels to rub together…[she] was single, her husband had been murdered in 1973, and throughout the 70’s she was struggling to survive, cope, and make it, and that meant sometimes having your children on their own while you went out to win the bread because there was no other breadwinner.” At the age of 11, Taylor was sexually assaulted by a teenage boy in the neighborhood and afterward found herself dealing with the trauma alone, receiving very little comfort and sympathy from her mother. She was blamed for her own victimization and left to pick up the pieces. Subsequently, she was sent to stay with her Aunt Gerald and Uncle Ross and there, she lived among cousins and was once again the victim of abuse.

Luckily for Taylor, she had extraordinary teachers who saw something remarkable in her and were there to provide her with what she needed. “They gave me everything from Mark Twain and Hemingway and William Ernest Henley to Margaret Walker and James Baldwin and these literary icons, Nikki Giovanni. They gave me all of these things and when I had absorbed that they gave me more. So I was receiving an education that I don’t think many of my peers [were] getting. For some reason I had been plucked out as something special.” Later in life, she was able to use the writing she learned from those teachers to help her through deep-rooted, recurring trauma and depression. “[I could] write a new essay and sell it to a local magazine, write a new press release and sell public relation services to a local company. I was able to write myself out of trouble more often than not and it was because of the basic competency that I’d been given in middle school that never left me and… I’ve built an entire career off of that. So I’ve been on MSNBC, and CNN, and NBC News and places that I could not have imagined for myself as a child and today I’m Chief Communications Officer at a world-renowned cancer institute where I work alongside heroes every day. I would not be here but for the diversity of those perspectives that I received…”