The Golden Road Beckons Readers but Ultimately Leads Nowhere

Author Caille Millner has certainly found success at a young age—she will be 28 this year. Her memoir The Golden Road: The Notes of My Gentrification (2007) is already her second published book, and she has won numerous prizes and distinctions, including being named one of Ten Young Writers on the Rise by the Columbia Journalism School in 2002.

Like her contemporary Zadie Smith, Millner is haunted by the many worlds she has occupied, each time constructing a schematic version of her identity as she moves from place to place like a fugitive. The scope of her autobiography is not limited to her own experiences—like so many children and grandchildren of immigrants, she needs to confront the vestiges of past scars and the legacy of helplessness that cannot be effaced as generations pass.

Unfortunately, there is little in the book that distinguishes it from other autobiographies or makes the reader want to invest in the hopes and dreams of its author—most of the time, it evokes only indifference. In one of the beginning passages, for example, she lists memories from her childhood. “Slip n’ slides, kiddie pools, and jugs of Kool-Aid dragged out to front yards during hot summer nights. Parents drunk enough on the heat and the long conversations to slosh in the pool by midnight.” These images are beautiful, even poetic, but they do not serve to evoke emotional responses from the reader, since the author herself does not explain how these memories are meaningful to her. Similar lists of moments are dispersed throughout the autobiography, each equally irrelevant as those before it.

Perhaps because of this dearth of necessary explanations, Millner never really convinces readers that her journey has been unique, that it is worth learning from, or that she has changed in a significant way. An autobiography is still a story, but at times this one seems too self-serving, almost like a diary, in which the author wishes to record all her memories, from childhood to adulthood, from one continent to the next, rather than providing enough insight into her psyche for readers to be engaged.

The opening line of the book forecasts the author’s obsessive need to identify herself with a certain racial group throughout her autobiography—“Maybe it’s best to begin this story not when I learned I was black, but when I learned I wasn’t brown.” Her primary struggle is to assimilate into either the “brown” culture or the “black” culture, but she finds solace in neither of these groups.

Perhaps the message is that there is never a real solution to all the complex contradictions involved in a multiracial and multicultural identity. She certainly never finds answers and leaves readers hanging—but not necessarily wanting more. Due to her use of multiple settings and her lack of coherent transitions, the ends do not meet even in the final moments of the book.

However, there are moments that stand out for their beauty and clarity. Ironically, the passages that are clearest describe people Millner barely knows. During her last visit to her newly-ex-boyfriend’s childhood home, she knows that her first meeting with his father will also be her last. However, her second-hand knowledge of his displacement during World War II fascinates her, and she desperately wants to know more. In one of her most stylistically-distinctive moments, she tries to imagine how he felt when he realized he had to leave. “He needed to tell me what he had felt on the cold gray day he stood on a quay in a long line of quivering children. He would have dug his small white fists deep into his pockets, and as he stared blinking, into the flat granite sky he would have told himself that it was all right...”

There is no doubt that Millner writes earnestly, even passionately. She always seeks to be a mouthpiece—for her alcoholic grandfather, for her troubled friends, for her mother (to whom she dedicates the autobiography). She speaks insistently for her friend Hans, who, like her, struggles between his French and Vietnamese heritages. She says with pride, “It took me many years to piece all of this together. Hans told me only those parts of his history that made him proud.”

As explained on the back cover of The Golden Road, Millner tries to tell “a human story.” Unfortunately, she is not successful in writing enough to help us understand her. Our glimpses into her family’s past have incomparable clarity to Millner’s present and future. Perhaps she needs to be less generous to those around her and instead focus on her own voice, her own story—perhaps she should just indulge readers and let them in.