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The glimpse she gives us into the inner workings of her mind. So what makes this lyrical coming-of-age memoir so damn awesome? Personally, I think it’s Gurba’s voice. She ended up passing it on to her husband, who also loved it. A friend and I decided to read it together and I think each of us barreled through it in just two evenings. I feel as if the entire bookternet has been raving about this book, and with good reason.
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But lately, women writers haven’t been content to just shut up, or even to modulate their writing in order to make it more palatable to others. When people demean such writing, it’s partially because they want to silence it, and to suppress the conversation around certain topics. This style of writing is often denigrated many of the subjects touched upon in such works relegated to women-only categories deemed not serious enough for, well, “serious literature.” Which I think is a load of hooey. Much has been made of the “confessional” writing of women. In fact, open, honest, strong writing by equally strong women writers is only becoming more prevalent. And it’s not the first book I’ve read this year to grip me with its levels of honesty. More than anything else, however, I was struck by its raw honesty, by the sharing of an interior life that was not always pretty, but which was powerful in its sincerity. There were lines, in fact, that made me sit up straight because of how perfectly they elucidated certain issues. A collection of autobiographical essays that tackle race and gender, I knew it would be a stunner from the very first page, and it was.
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Last night, I crawled into bed early to finish a review copy of Morgan Jerkins’s This Will Be My Undoing(January 2018).