What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses life with HIV/AIDS and the associated social and cultural stigmas.

Pearl Cleage is a novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. Cleage has published 13 works of fiction and nonfiction and 4 plays. Her diverse authorial career was inspired by her personal political endeavors. Before she became a writer, Cleage worked as a speechwriter and press secretary for Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Eager to express her own ideas, opinions, and stories in writing, Cleage left the political arena to focus on creative writing.

Cleage’s novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and features scenarios, places, and themes relevant to Cleage’s personal life. Like the novel’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Ava Johnson, Cleage has also lived between Michigan and Georgia. She spent much of her childhood in the Detroit area before relocating to Atlanta. The novel also explores issues that Cleage considers across her personal canon. In both her writing and her politics, Cleage seeks change and awareness for those living with HIV/AIDs, women, and Black Americans. By centering the life, story, and