I'll Take You There

"In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage." So begins I'll Take You There, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. Pitiless in exposing the follies of the time (the bizarre "sisterhood" of sororities, the self-lacerating extremes of the intellectual life), I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks -- and curious rewards -- of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.