The House at Sugar Beach

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (2008) is a memoir written by Obama-era New York Times White House correspondent Helene Cooper. The book was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Autobiography, a finalist for the Borders 2008 Original Voices Award, and was labeled a notable book by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. In Sugar Beach, Cooper, a Liberian refugee, reflects on her childhood and career when she returns to her home country for the first time in more than two decades. The book is dedicated to Cooper’s parents “and the family they raised at Sugar Beach.”

In 1980 in Monrovia, Liberia, Cooper is fourteen years old and living on Sugar Beach with her family in their twenty-two-room mansion. The Coopers are members of the affluent Liberian elite who can trace their lineage back to the county’s founders—freemen who sailed from New York to what would become Monrovia in 1820. Present day Cooper reflects that her privileged upbringing in a country absent the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow allowed her to develop into a confident young woman, one who didn’t struggle with the kind of internalized racism that can develop in young, black men and women growing up in the United States. Also empowering for a young Cooper is her family’s matriarchal structure headed by Cooper’s tough-talking maternal grandmother, Mama Grand. The family also included a foster child, Eunice, who was taken in when Cooper was eight years old.

That year (1980), a military coup toppled and destabilized the Liberian government. On Cooper’s birthday, the country’s civil war began to directly impact her life when her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, was killed in a televised execution. One day, the rebels came to the Coopers’ home. Cooper’s mother tried to protect her daughters by sending them upstairs while the soldiers forced her into the basement to rape her. Ultimately, the family flees the violence and relocates to Knoxville, Tennessee. However, because she is not a blood relative, they are forced to leave Eunice behind in Liberia.



In Knoxville, Cooper struggles to adjust to life at her new school where she is bullied for being different. At the same time, she throws herself into school, work, and her new life to avoid dealing with the trauma she experienced on Sugar Beach. Cooper goes on to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning her journalism degree. She becomes hugely successful in her field, writing for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, traveling around the globe reporting on current events. In 2003, Cooper travels to Iraq as a war correspondent. She’s riding on a Humvee when it’s hit and destroyed by a tank, nearly killing her. This near-death experience forces Cooper to finally address the pain she has been avoiding since fleeing Liberia. Describing that experience, she writes, “At that moment, as I lay in the sand in the desert, my chemsuit soaked with what turned out to be oil, not blood, I thought of Liberia.”

Reflecting on what happened in Iraq, Cooper felt inspired to return to Liberia for the first time. Back in Monrovia, Cooper returns to Sugar Beach and finds it a very different place than it was when she left it. Liberians are still feeling the twisted legacy of Samuel Doe, the military leader turned politician who lead the 1980 coup d’état and took over the government of Liberia after the death of President Tolbert. Civil war continued to rage during his presidency; Doe’s government was notoriously corrupt and heavily influenced by ethnic prejudices. Doe was executed in 1990, but the country has yet to recover. Cooper’s return also marks her reunion with foster-sister Eunice, who stayed behind in Monrovia and lived through all of the conflicts that followed the Coopers’ escape. The sisters return to the house where they once lived together and find it a shell of its former self. The house serves as a monument to everything they have lost. Cooper receives forgiveness from Eunice and is finally able to come to terms with the trauma she endured and the loss of the world she grew up in.

The House on Sugar Beach is prefaced by a map of Africa and Liberia and a version of Cooper’s family tree extending all the way back to Liberia’s founders. The book is a New York Times bestseller. Critics praised Cooper for her unique “insider/outsider” perspective, lyrical style, and “fierce honesty.” After Sugar Beach was published, Helene Cooper began researching and interviewing Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected head of state. This culminated in Cooper’s second book, Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, which was published in 2017.