If you’re going to take advice from someone’s mom, then why not “Good Morning America” host Robin Roberts’ mother? The 51-year-old is in great shape, she looks fantastic, she’s got a great job and she’s gracefully handled a brush with breast cancer and the destruction of her hometown in Hurricane Katrina. So if her mom writes an advice book, it’s one you should read. Fortunately, she has. Eighty-eight-year-old Lucimarian Roberts’ new book “My Story, My Song: Mother-Daughter Reflections on Life and Faith” is a testimony to a life lived by faith.
Lucimarian Tolliver Roberts was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, the first in her family to attend college. She graduated from Howard and she and her husband, Lawrence Roberts, one of the Tuskeegee Airmen, were married 57 years and raised four children in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The story is not without its pain. Roberts and her husband moved some 27 times during his military career. She handled her husband’s drinking, the ills of segregation and the challenges of losing a son-in-law as well as much of her family home when Katrina hit. She also helped her daughter deal with breast cancer, diagnosed in 2007. The book includes her accounts of the sustaining power of the Lord that Roberts’s mother and her children live by.
“It was a real labor of love,” Robin Roberts told Tavis Smiley on his PBS show. “We knocked heads a little bit, you know mother –daughter, but it was very important for her to tell her story and this is her story.” Roberts provides commentary at the end of each chapter. The book details a life that is dominated by faith and music, something that the elder Roberts finds, along with her religious faith, to be a primary source of solace in her life.
“I have always believed in the power of music, and when you put that together with a good story, I am hooked,” says Roberts’ “GMA” colleague Gayle King. “Thank you to Lucimarian Roberts for sharing her life s journey with us. And, oh, what a story– growing up with an alcoholic father, dealing with racial prejudice, raising four children, and married for fifty-seven years to a Tuskegee Airman! This story is an inspiring and poignant example of what really matters in life.”
See the trailer for “My Story, My Song” by Lucimarian Roberts below.
Hear an audio excerpt of the first chapter.
