Background
Patrice Gaines was born in 1949 in the United States. She spent a relatively secure, sheltered childhood on Quantico and other military bases while her father served in the American Marines. Her mother was a homemaker.
Washington, United States
Washington Post
(An award-winning Washington Post reporter explores the tw...)
An award-winning Washington Post reporter explores the twisted path she traveled to find her place as a confident black female in a world that values whiteness and maleness. Here is a rich and insightful story of a life lived on the edge by a woman formerly preoccupied with pleasing everyone but herself. From the Hardcover edition.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BXA3BS/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(In sections devoted to faith, courage, family, friends, s...)
In sections devoted to faith, courage, family, friends, self-love, dating, marriage, and work, Patrice Gaines reveals how she and others who have redeemed their lives arrived at their personal moments of grace. 192 pp. Author tour. National print ads & publicity. 50,000 print. From the Hardcover edition.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FGLXAQ/?tag=2022091-20
1997
Patrice Gaines was born in 1949 in the United States. She spent a relatively secure, sheltered childhood on Quantico and other military bases while her father served in the American Marines. Her mother was a homemaker.
Gaines attended a college.
Because of the humiliation and racism that Gaines experienced in her youth, she began to take drugs. At the age of 21, she even spent several weeks in jail because of the charges for possession of heroin.
But that all didn't stop Gaines from becoming a popular reporter for the Washington Post from 1985 and writer. She also worked for other newspapers, including the Charlotte Observer and the Miami Herald.
Concerning her writings, Gaines’s first book, 1994’s Laughing in the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color—A Journey from Prison to Power, expanded on her spoken recollections to become an inspirational autobiography. Joyce Ladner, reviewing the volume for the Washington Post Book World, acclaimed Gaines for being “brutally honest about her most private experiences” and for grappling with questions of why she rebelled and how she escaped a harrowing existence. Ladner declared, “The value of this book is not in reading about the author’s sensationalist, deviant lifestyle, but in learning how she was able to save herself from destruction.” A reviewer with a different response was Belles Lettres contributor Dale Edwyna Smith, who felt that the book dwelled on surface issues and did not answer the profound questions it raised.
Gaines employed her larger vision of life in her follow-up book, Moments of Grace: Meeting the Challenge to Change, a 1997 volume that uses her personal background as a springboard from which to examine those often-painful moments in anyone’s life that provide opportunities for personal and spiritual growth. We are always touched by grace, Gaines believes, although we do not always realize it. In separate chapters, she explored a number of areas of life—such as love, work, family, and friendship—wherein the courage, faith, and perseverance to change may be found. Library Journal reviewer Bernadette McGrath responded to Moments of Grace with admiration for its author’s journalistic “tough detachment and clarity,” as well as for Gaines’s “passionate” advocacy of the power of hope and faith. A critic in Publishers Weekly noted the book’s lack of “preaching or cheerleading” and praised its honesty and compassion, its understanding of the human resistance to change, and Gaines’s “intelligent and mellow wisdom.”
Nowadays she works as a writing teacher, who motivates and helps young new riters to mold their stories into published books. Being a motivational speaker, Gaines travels the country, takes part and talks at different conferences, colleges, prisons and drug rehab programs, her aim is to inspire her audience, telling the story of her own hard life.
In addition, she is a co-founder of a nonprofit the Brown Angel Center, which gives a monthly workshop for women at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Jail. She holds writing workshops, named "Writing by the Water", in which she teaches women writers.
(In sections devoted to faith, courage, family, friends, s...)
1997(An award-winning Washington Post reporter explores the tw...)
1994Patrice’s goal is to use language—whether written or spoken—to heal, uplift and encourage. That doesn’t mean she isn’t funny as heck sometimes. She believes laughter makes the pain, the challenges—and the years—go by much more quickly.
Quotations: "I want to go beyond being black, and beyond being a woman. I want to go to being just a human being. But it’s as if this world won’t really let you be that. It constantly wants to define you, to restrict you."
Patrice Gaines first encountered racism in adolescence, when white girl friends stopped accepting her, white boys would not ask her to dance, and white teachers treated her as the class servant. She rebelled not only against this social pathology but against her family background, especially against her father, whom she saw as distant and unloving. Years of brutal, raw experience followed: Gaines used heroin (she claims to have been addicted psychologically but not physically), went to jail for drug possession and shoplifting, was raped twice, bore a child at age eighteen.
Later Gaines was able to redeem her life through a combination of self-esteem, religious faith, and familial love. She reclaimed her relationship with her father, whom she found to be a loving person underneath his military exterior (and who, she found accidentally, was not her biological father). She devoted herself to raising her daughter in the hope that the child would avoid her own early errors.
Gaines married three times. She has a daughter.