On Michael Jackson by Margo Jefferson, review: As smart as it is readable

Two years ago, British readers were introduced to Margo Jefferson’s work in the form of her masterful memoir Negroland, an account of growing up as part of Chicago’s black elite. It won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in the US, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize here in the UK, so it makes sense that Granta is now publishing a British edition Jefferson’s first book, On Michael Jackson (12 years after the original American edition). A new introduction – written by Jefferson last year – brings the volume up to date, Jackson having died between editions. “I mourn him,” Jefferson writes. “I was mourning when I wrote the book, but I was confounded and obsessed too.” What she’d – what we’d all – witnessed had been an astonishing metamorphosis. Jackson made his assured television debut at the age of 10 back in 1968 as a fresh-faced child star, all “flower power” and “doo-wop glitter.” 35 years later and the man everyone now recognised was one charged with seven counts of child molestation, whose mug shot, as Jefferson puts it, looked “like a haggard drag queen stunned by the daylight.” Jefferson, who describes herself and her friends “dancing… Read full this story

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