The book ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career",[2] writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

By the time Song was written in 2002, sixteen years after her previous autobiography, Angelou had experienced great fame and recognition as an author and poet.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) is the sixth of Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies, and at the time of its publication it was considered to be the final installment.

[6] Angelou wrote two collections of essays in the interim, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997), which writer Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts".

Her nineteen-year-old son Guy is attending college in Ghana, and she is leaving a controlling relationship—her "romantic other", whom she described as "a powerful West African man who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane".

Devastated and grief-stricken, she moves to Hawaii to be near her brother and to resume her singing and performing career, which she had given up before leaving for Africa several years earlier.

Again devastated, she isolates herself until invited to a dinner party also attended by her friend James Baldwin and cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy.

She accepts his challenge, and Song ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career",[2] writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: "What are you looking at me for.

[24] Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agreed, and viewed Angelou as representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that spoke for an entire group of people.

[1] Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they were written by a single author, they were chronological, and they contained elements of character, technique, and theme.

[10] Reviewer Elsie B. Washington agreed, and stated that A Song Flung Up to Heaven "offers a glimpse into the life of a literary icon in the making" influenced by historical events and personalities such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Baldwin.

[31] Author Lyman B. Hagen has placed Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography, but insisted that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.

[32] In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discussed her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs.

[33] When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about".

Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis, agreed, stating that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.

[37] Paula Friedman of The New York Times Book Review appreciated Angelou's "occasions of critical self-assessment and modesty" not present in many other autobiographies.

[38] Patricia Elam of The New Crisis agreed, stating that there is much to admire both about the book and about the "large life", full of tension, laughter, and love, it describes.

Rather than struggling to recall the details of a distant past, Angelou sketches the scenes with broad familiarity, as if using a memory brush, and the reader is transported just the same.

Reviewer Margaret Busby, who saw this book "not so much an ending as a beginning", called Song "the culmination of a unique autobiographical achievement, a glorious celebration of indomitable spirit".

[4] Scholar John McWhorter did not look at Angelou's use of vignettes as positively, and stated that all of her books were short, divided into "ever shorter" chapters as her series progressed, and "sometimes seem written for children rather than adults".

[7] Als stated that Angelou, in her six autobiographies, "has given us ... the self-aggrandizing, homespun, and sometimes oddly prudish story of a black woman who, when faced with the trials of life, simply makes do".