The title of WNBA superstar Candace Parker’s book makes it sound like a self-help volume. It certainly offers readers the wisdom of insights from her storied career. As the book blurb says, it covers how to:
Learn from and lean on your Community
Show up as Authentically you
Realize that Negativity is a part of life
Embrace the excitement of the everyday Dash
And fight for Opportunity for yourself and other
At the same time, it feels more like a memoir, the story of her life from her early days playing basketball with her two older brothers and capturing attention with her high school play, through her college days at the University of Tennessee under the legendary Pat Summitt, to WNBA stardom alongside seasons in Russia, China, and Turkey, to time with Team USA, earning two Olympic gold medals. We see how she battled through injury after injury (“both of my knees are bone-on-bone” she tells us) to keep playing the game that was her passion, finally retiring in 2024 and becoming the president of Adidas Women’s Basketball.
This is also a story of family, both the family that Parker grew up in and the family that she created. She shares the story of her first marriage to an NBA star and becoming a mother to her daughter, Lailaa, then the dissolution of that marriage and later falling in love with Russian basketball player Anna Petrakova. Parker writes candidly and lovingly about her and Petrakova’s relationship and how “I liked who I allowed myself to be in her presence.” She talks about coming out while in the spotlight, how she and Petrakova expanded their family through assisted reproduction (they now also have two sons, Airr and Hartt), and how they have dealt with the reactions of people to their relationship, “American and Russian. Black and white. Both women, with me being a single mom.”
We see how the pending birth of their son led her to finally come out to the world. “I don’t want our son to look up at me one day and wonder why I didn’t publicly claim his other mother,” she writes. And we see how other queer players and teammates supported them in their relationship.
She gives us an inside look at how she navigated work-life balance, both as a WNBA player and as one who had to go overseas during the off-seasons to play in other leagues and support her child, bringing Lailaa along and having to make her own arrangements for child care, breast pumping, and other details. She writes, too, that “Being a mother and a professional basketball player tested me to no end because I was constantly being forced into preconceived notions of what a successful player and an attentive mother looked like.”
We also see how lessons in one area of her life carry over to another. For example, while we might expect that Summitt had an impact on her as a player, Parker says that Summitt “has always guided me home to my best and most authentic self…. When I’ve pushed myself, when I’ve put someone else in a position to succeed, or when I’m parenting my kids, I feel her.” She says, too, that “Motherhood is the most challenging role I’ve held, and because I was a mother, I also learned in time to be a better, more dependable teammate.”
Additionally, she looks critically at how the WNBA has treated its players who are Black, and/or queer, and/or parents. While she doesn’t pull any punches here, her criticism is that of someone who believes in the league enough to want it to improve.
The book is broadly chronological, but not rigidly so; Parker looks at her various key themes in ways that mean she sometimes looks back at parts of her story that she hadn’t shared earlier. It’s well done, and keeps the book from the plodding “one thing after another” approach that makes some memoirs feel tedious.
What I appreciate most about the book, though, is that Parker shows us her growth as a human being, not just a basketball player, and introduces us to the various people who have helped her in that development. “I am a tapestry of all the people who trusted pieces of their legacies with me, physical or otherwise,” she says. The book shows us how that tapestry was woven.
If you’re a basketball fan, you’ll love the insider look at some of her most memorable games and moments; if you’re a parent or prospective parent (particularly a queer mom), you’ll appreciate the look at her own parenthood journey; and if you’re simply looking for inspiration and advice from someone who’s excelled in her field, you’ll have that, too, making this a recommended volume.
