LOVELY ONE: A Memoir, by Ketanji Brown Jackson
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson handed down many important decisions on her way to becoming the first Black woman appointed to the nation’s highest court in 2022. But perhaps the most astute was rejecting a career in the magazine industry before anyone could see it was dying.
In a packed but fast-moving new memoir, “Lovely One,” Jackson tells how 30 years before, during a brief stint as a reporter-researcher at Time, she suggested that a top editor might want to send someone to cover Hurricane Andrew. “Oh, we don’t do weather stories,” he replied dismissively of the storm that would cause $27 billion in damage, including ripping the roofs off most homes on her parents’ street in Miami.
“Win or lose a case, the law was logical and understandable,” she writes, “whereas in journalism the criteria for one story being chosen over another seemed subjective and often somewhat arbitrary.”
Subjective? Supreme Court cases? Never.
Jackson also considered becoming a Broadway actress, teaching herself to sing for a college revue about Billie Holiday, and her book could probably be optioned for a bio-musical itself. (Imagine the big “Immunity” number!) “Lovely One” is about motivation and mentors, swooshing through a résumé without apparent flaw. It’s a great glass elevator of uplift.
The title is the translation of Jackson’s given name, Ketanji Onyika, a phrase from an untraced African dialect suggested by her Aunt Carolynn, a missionary. Ketanji was born in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, the same date as Constance Baker Motley, the first Black female federal judge, who became her “personal heroine and forever role model.”
Her father, Johnny, was a school-board attorney; her mother, Ellery, became a principal after teaching science, and little Ketanji was “an enthusiastic pupil, a Mama-pleasing little sponge,” whose foundational texts included “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” and the blessedly inclusive “Schoolhouse Rock!” Her younger brother, Ketajh, was more of a risk taker; he became a drug-enforcement detective in the Baltimore unit that inspired “The Wire” and served in Operation Enduring Freedom before settling down to nice relaxing work in commercial litigation.