Love, Rita

A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, profound love and loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis.

In Love, Rita Bridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister Rita, who knew Bridgett before she knew herself. Just four years apart in age, as the two sisters grew into young adulthood they left behind their childhood rivalry and became best friends.

Rita was a vivacious woman who attended Fisk University at age sixteen, and went on to become a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA, and later a popular special ed teacher; in doing so, she modeled for her younger sister Bridgett how to live boldly. And in the face of family tragedy, the two sisters leaned on each other to heal; their closeness grew, until Rita’s life was cut short by lupus when she was forty-four. This led Bridgett to ask the simple, heartbreaking question: Why Rita?

Love, Rita is a brave and beautiful homage that not only celebrates the special, complex bond of sisterhood but also reveals what it is to live, and die, as a Black woman in America.

This moving memoir, full of joy and heartbreak, family history alongside American history, uses Rita’s life as a lens to examine the persistent effects of racism in the lives of Black women—and the men they love. This poignant, deeply resonant portrait of an unforgettable woman and her impact on those she left behind is essential reading.