"Yesterday I got the call. ‘My mother is dead,’ my mother said. I am going to edit my life. There are too many memories that I don’t need."

Editing her life is apparently something Georgette Collins had perfected by the time she received this tragic news from her Jamaican family. Caught between the categories that define the rest of us, Georgette spent her childhood, adolescence, and early twenties attempting to construct some order in her life. Much like the mixed-media collages on which she concentrated her artistic energies during one phase of her life, the true identity of Georgette was pieced together, little eclectic slices of the societies she inhabited. Finally, this fragmentation appears to have driven our main character to a collision of anxiety, alcoholism, and various other addictions.

Black Marks is Kirsten Dinnall Hoyte’s first novel, although the author has garnered attention for other written accomplishments. Hoyte has created a narrative that captures the essence of fluidity. Her character Georgette swims (drowns?) between various identities, flowing back and forth in time and geography in a way that is confusing at first, but then leaves the reader with an appreciation for the confusion her life has generated.

Georgette’s search for her "true-true" name begins in Jamaica, where she, along with her brothers, has been left for more than a year under the care of her maternal grandmother while their parents struggle through their divorce in the U.S. Georgette, at this young stage of her life, has found a sense of peace within herself while she attends the private school with other well-off Jamaican children (or at the very least, lacks the clouded mind that marks her later years); this fragile peace ends when she is scooped up by her mother and returned to her family’s home in Massachusetts. Already, Georgette’s sense of self has been challenged. She is sent to an elite day school, where most of the other students represent White upper middle class society. She understands that she will remain ostracized with her accent and daydreams throughout her career there. Ironically, her later acceptance into that same society is equally tainted. Georgette at twenty years of age is "kept" by a wealthy White woman who graduated a few years ahead of her. The woman’s obsession with Black art and beautiful Black female artists both objectifies and empowers Georgette:

"Amanda, you act like those fags. Looks are everything to you. Women are to be looked at and.... I mean, I feel like I’m just another part of your art collection, the latest pretty black piece. You don’t even like me. You just want me and think that you can own me because I fit certain labels. [...] My face was cold, my heart steely and hard. I saw Page and the other Ellis girls in front of me. I saw the countless white friends who over the years had hurt me unintentionally by asking me to soothe their guilt and satisfy their curiosity. For a moment, I was no longer stoic nor considerate nor even reasonable. I was strong, and the moment was beautiful." Georgette’s strength crumbles with Amanda’s tears, however, and the only way for her to escape the relationship is by the measures as extreme as the labels she continues to bounce between: Georgette flees the country for months without telling anyone.

Of course, Georgette pulls other disappearing acts as well. Not only does she vanish into a rehabilitation center without informing anyone—family, boyfriend, landlord, school—but she apparently disappears from herself as well. Georgette, in her search for the "true-true" name (the secret name you know yourself by, a relic of Jamaican culture), forgets, briefly, much of her memory. Her quest to find herself is almost as physical as it is emotional. She appears to wrench her personal history from the deepest, most painful portions of her soul. She revisits the events that led to her privileged but confusing life at Harvard and other schools, her desirable job at the Boston Public Library as a reference librarian, her relationships with an odd collection of lovers, and her almost tangible ties to writing and drawing.

Georgette’s family is equally confused about their only daughter’s struggle and breakdown. "My mother was silent, then she put down her pen and looked directly at me. ‘Georgette, you’re not a child. I can’t force you to do anything. But before you leave, I think you should consider whether or not you’re burning bridges because you actually want them gone or because you’ve fallen in love with the sight of the fire.’"

As Georgette’s journey continues, she finds healing in the oddest place: still outside the labels of gay and straight, rich and poor, White and Black, Jamaica and the United States. But what’s most important is that readers will recognize her "true-true" name as well as appreciate the fantastic literary achievement that gets her there.