This book, neither autobiographical novel nor writing manual, is a collection of emotionally powerful essays. Chee holds his own life up to careful scrutiny and takes us along for the ride. So maybe it is a kind of autobiographical novel. And for him to be blurring boundaries seems perfectly appropriate.
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Serano)
This was slow-going at times, not at all because it is uninteresting, but because, for me, it was quite challenging. I had to pause frequently to check in to see if I thought I was understanding Serano’s points. Opening this book (for me) was like walking into the middle of a conversation that had been in progress for a while. It also has some of the flaws that essay collections often feature, like repetition. The reliance on the example of a particular music festival got irritating. Overall, though, this was a mind/eye-opening read. I chose it because it was a selection for a book club group I wanted to join. I could use some guidance on where to go next in order to understand this conversation. But if I understand Serano’s argument about the scapegoating of femininity, I was wholeheartedly convinced.
For those of you receiving these as emails, I apologize that so many are coming at once. I was having some technical problems gaining access to my blog. The problems have been resolved, but I’ve got quite a stack to review!
Having and Being Had (Biss)
Biss is one of the great essayists of our day. I have always loved the way she narrates her way through several seemingly only tangentially related topics until she slowly tightens the knot and arrives, without fanfare or excessive flourish, at a profound, if not conclusion, then stopping place.
So I was definitely startled when the first essay in this collection was so short. And then the second. And then I flipped ahead and saw that they were all like that. She addresses this: “I wondered, as I was writing this book, what it was I was writing. Was it a collection of poems? An essay in episodes? A series of jokes, made at my own expense? A high-stakes game? A midlife crisis? An internal audit? Was it, like Cyril Connolly’s book The Unquiet Grave, ‘an experiment in self-dismantling’? Or was it an experiment in refusing the givens of the middle class?” (288).
Given the topic of many if not all of the essays, I take that last question as rhetorical, with the suggestion being that the length of her former essays somehow equates with being in the middle class. Biss has bought a house, and many of the essays recount the internal conflicts she inherits as a consequence. It was not without a sense of irony that I left the house with the book in order to stay out of the way of the people who come once a week to clean it. I am being overly generous to myself. Yes, I want to make their job easier by not being an obstacle, but I am also a bit uncomfortable with this being something we can now afford. That said, my discomfort does not extend to such a point for me to say that I will do the cleaning instead. That, almost exclusively, falls on my partner. In short, my attitude has been that if she wants it and says we can afford it, then we will pay for the service.
So, yes, these essays, like Biss’ best, made me think. Still, I had to wonder about their brevity. At times it felt like she was reaching for an ending, a kind of clever wink, that seemed out of character with her earlier work when she allowed her observations and connections do the work.
So if longer essays are middle class, I guess I am middle class. Still, I am not sure I buy that designation. Part of what makes Biss’ earlier work so refreshing and new is her ability to weave together a kind of hybrid piece, something – I can’t claim to be widely read in the standard essay form – that I certainly never encountered in the traditional (read: white, male, cisgender) essays I had experienced before her remarkable Notes from No Man’s Land. I think one of the freedoms of the essay form is that they can (and should, in my mind) be as long as they need to be. I wondered whether some of these could have been combined and made more effective that way. Who knows?
So read them? Yes, definitely. Biss is such a remarkable observer. Her insights and questions will resonate in your everyday life. For those, I will continue to follow her work, whatever form it takes and maybe, ultimately, I’ll understand more about why she made the choices she did in this one. I mean, probably because I have more experience with them, I tend to get when authors are experimenting with the form of a novel. This “essay in episodes”? I am not sure I got.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Hong)
This book is every single kind of brilliant. Hong’s sharp prose makes you sit up and take notice. If her words don’t shake you, her ideas definitely will. These essays – and there is not a weak one in the bunch (I kept saying to myself, “That was the best one,” then, “No, that one was the best one) – are incisive and nuanced. They telescope between the specific and the general, the personal and the political and will leave you gasping for breath. Don’t read them with a pencil; you’ll just want to annotate everything. This is an absolute masterpiece.
A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black Performance (Abdurraqib)
If you haven’t found this author yet, why not? I don’t think there’s another person around who writes like him. The energy of his words pops off the page, and the connections he makes are piercing and revelatory. He has, if not re-invented, then at least reinvigorated the essay form. When you reach the end of one of his essays, you will find yourself gasping for breath and sighing in wonder. His ability to ‘read’ pop culture and its reciprocal relationship with society-at-large is absolutely visionary.
His poetry is great, too.
The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America (Watkins)
These essays wore think after a while; they became less essay and more rants (at times almost libelous, I thought). Watkins’ voice is one of experience, to be sure, but I did not really find any insights here that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. I appreciate that he took up questions of diet in East Baltimore, but I would have liked to see him dig in a bit more – access to grocery stores, corner stores, urban gardens, etc.. His conclusions were largely surface level. That’s not to say that I think they are wrong – just that I don’t think he adds much here to the conversation about, for example, Freddie Gray. He is a person to watch, I think; I’d love to hear him speak. His voice pops off the page at times, but mostly his prose is pretty flat.
Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Minor)
Once again, I so admire Minor’s ability to bring together strands of related topics and form beautiful, insightful and coherent prose. I don’t know how she does it. I would love to see her rough drafts. A description of the various strands of this book would likely send you running for the hills, but I encourage you to take a chance on this and Bright Archive. I think we’re talking about one of the best essayists working today.
The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays (Gabbert)
I am pretty addicted to the BETWEEN THE COVERS podcast (https://tinhouse.com/podcasts/) and I heard Ms. Gabbert on there and was inspired to get her book. I appreciate that there’s a unity to her essays – one that her mother describes better than her – namely, disasters and how we think about them. I have trouble with essay collections which are disconnected. Still, there’s a decent amount of repetition here in terms of insights. I wondered what it would have been like if she’d thought on a larger scale and organized this collection into one book. As it stands, each essay comes off like an unnecessary re-start and they definitely began to blur together. So I recommend the podcast and maybe one or two of her essays. That’ll keep you.
Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Garza, trans. by Booker)
It is amazing, as Garza notes at one point, how little I know about the country directly south of my own. I’ve even been there now as a protected tourist. They were not the travel circumstances I would have chosen, but they were the circumstances offered and it seemed right to accept. I’m glad we did. I learned a great deal about Mexico’s past but despite the election that took place while we were there, I learned little of its current events. After reading Garza’s book, I know more about their so-called war on drugs and absolutely horrifying epidemic of femicides.
Garza, bravely it seems to me, does not shy away from traveling to dangerous parts of the country to speak with those left behind by the killings, those for whom being confined to their homes was not new when the pandemic arose. There is no safety anywhere else.
I have my standard complaints about the kind of greatest hits essay collection Garza presents here. There’s a lot of overlap. I’m not sure where she generally publishes, but these essays are pretty short. Could several of them been combined into one larger piece? Could they at least have been organized by topic?
Still, Garza’s diagnosis that Mexico is a country constantly in the process of grieving seems accurate to me and she sees hope in the way the public mourning has been turned outward into art, into protest and especially into writing. Her final piece, “Keep Writing,” more manifesto than essay, is especially inspiring. If she can write that after what she’s witnessed, how can I object?
The Souls of Yellow Folks/Essays (Yang)
Although I wasn’t always that interested in Yang’s topics, his sharp, detailed and incisive writing could get me through, for examples, an overview analysis of 800 pages of sex diaries.
But I made a mistake. I judged a book not by its cover, but by its title. I thought a book that would borrow from DuBois would attempt to do for the Asian community what DuBois sought to do for the Black community. There 3.5 such essays (Part I and a kind of epilogue to another piece). I thought they were the most compelling ones.
Look, the man can write about whatever he wants to write about. With that title, though, he made a promise that he didn’t keep.
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