Reading Wednesday Is Way Behind
Honestly, I didn't stop posting because you all had such good answers to my what-to-post questions. I stopped posting because I got too busy to read DW, and I won't post if I'm not caught up. But here it is still Wednesday, and I have a long stack of books to comment on.
***
(An even longer review of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay, of which this is an excerpt, can be found at at Body Impolitic), where I blog with
laurieopal .
I have been a body image activist since the early 1980s. I have heard people’s body image stories, told my body image stories, led workshops where people tell their body image stories, edited body image stories for print. Doing this work for much of a lifetime, one of the many things I have learned is that while your story is not, is never, cannot be my story, your story nonetheless overlaps and strengthens and connects to my story in hundreds of places.
So that takes us to Roxane Gay, who has perhaps written the most powerful body image story ever told. Having made that statement, let me say what I don’t mean:
Gay, as she is extremely careful to stress, is not the victim of The Worst Trauma. She is precisely aware of her privileges and the ways she is lucky.
She is not, and is not trying to be, a stand-in for every other fat woman; her story is her own, not mine, and not anyone else’s.
Hunger is not a book about miraculous healing, or a road map for other fat and/or traumatized women to find healing.
The book has no new information, and doesn’t contain much that is surprising to someone who inhabits the world of fat activism.
What makes this book such a punch in the gut is that Hunger ranks high among the most nakedly honest books ever written. Whether Gay is reliving the story of her childhood, talking about her family, recounting relationships, or just telling every fat woman’s story of going to the doctor, she never for one second takes the easy way out. She never tells a simple version of the truth: the truth is always complex, thick, interwoven.
We live in a world where physical nakedness is easy currency, although its implications are extremely contextual and complicated, and the physical nakedness of fat women is fraught indeed. But Gay’s determination to be emotionally as naked as a human being can get is far from easy.
Just as everyone’s story is individual and unique, our stories all also overlap on each other. They intertwine and diverge and reconnect. And when they are brilliantly told, they reflect so much more than one person’s story. Without ever taking a moment to speculate on whether or not her truth is related to anyone else’s truth, Gay opens a window on human truth in general; she focuses unrelentingly on her own story, and by doing so models how each of us can see ourselves.
Read the book (if you can stand a graphic description of pre-teen sexual trauma, and an unflinching examination of its results). Read it whether you’re a lifetime body image activist or completely new to the concepts. Rarely will you find a book more worth your time and attention.
Lots of people (including me) will respond to this book by wanting to reach out and make a connection with Roxane Gay. If you have that reaction, and you follow through, I’m personally asking you now to make sure that whatever you send or say to her doesn’t ask for anything from her in return: not an acknowledgment of commonality, not a response, not advice, not comfort. She’s given us everything she has in this book, and you can be 100% sure that a great many readers are asking her for more, and everyone she has to turn away is a source of pain to her. Don’t be That Reader.
***
I'm not a Marvel reader, so I was missing a bunch of background which would have helped me understand the graphic novel Black Panther: The World of Wakanda written by Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rembert Browne, art by Afua Richardson, Alitha Martinez, and Joe Bennett. I'm still having some trouble figuring out who the good and bad guys are. (Maybe the movie will help?)
Anyway, the story itself is what you'd want from a Roxane Gay-written graphic novel (all kudos to her co-writers; I have no idea how they split up the work): layered, thoughtful, suspenseful, and erotic. I'm clearly going to need to read more in this series and in what I understand is Ta-Nehisi Coates' related series. But I hesitate to spend much money on graphic novels, which don't take much time to read for what they cost. (And they're not in my idiom, though I have come to appreciate them more and more over the years.)
***
Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is Becky Chambers' first novel, and in some ways it reads like one. It kept reminding me of the TV show Firefly, plus aliens (which are so much easier to do in books than in motion pictures). The two qualities that struck me most were the friendliness of it, i.e., how quickly I grew to feel connected to the characters and want them to do well, and Chambers' ability to make her aliens truly alien. In particular, fairly early on a couple of the aliens on the ship muse about how weird it is that humans place so much value on being happy, as if there was no value in the rest of the range of emotions. (I think this is actually more true of Americans than of humans, but it nonetheless felt like the kind of thing aliens might say to each other when humans weren't around.) She also has an alien whose pronoun is "they," and she (I suspect intentionally) uses that pronoun very differently than the gender-fluid/agendered community uses it, which was both disturbing and interesting.
One reason the book felt like a TV show is that it is very episodic. Some stories do build over the course of the book, but each chapter still feels like a complete story about one character, which is more or less finished by the end of the chapter.
I can pick nits here and there, and I don't especially love the episodic style, but I'm hooked, and will certainly read the next one. (Note to
ladyjax : I did really enjoy this, and there is some mildly interesting gender stuff, other than Ohan's pronouns, but if I had been on the Tiptree jury, I would have wanted something with more centrality of gender.)
***
A handful of my very favorite writers and essayists leave me with only two questions, "Why didn't I say that?" and "How do you say things so well for me?" Rebecca Solnit is one of them. (Laurie Penny is another.)
The Mother of All Questions is the third of her short Haymarket books of essays. I loved Men Explain Things to Me and I still haven't read Hope in the Dark, though I seem to have acquired it three times in e-book. This one is interesting in part because it tackles the #metoo issues from before the recent cataclysm, in an essay that lauds both Aziz Ansari and Louis CK, both of whom have since been tarred with the #metoo brush. Nonetheless, Solnit was (as we all do) working with the facts she had at the time, and writing with her usual clarity, wit, patience, impatience, and grace.
The title essay is about the ongoing insistence of interviewers and questioners to ask her, and all childless women, about why they don't have children. Most of the rest of the book is about issues relating to sexual harassment, rape (and rape jokes), and the power and lack of power of women in the world. She is admirably careful to continually bring in the related issues of race, gender identity, disability, and other marginalizations, while still staying focused. Her "80 Books No Woman Should Read" and its sequel essay ("Men Explain Lolita to Me") are especially pointed and valuable.
Even when she isn't writing about hope, Solnit gives me hope in the dark.
***
Currently devouring The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, which I read the beginning of in a proof copy in a friend's house. Bedside reading is The Left Hand of Darkness, and will probably be mostly Le Guin all year.
***
(An even longer review of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay, of which this is an excerpt, can be found at at Body Impolitic), where I blog with
laurieopal .
I have been a body image activist since the early 1980s. I have heard people’s body image stories, told my body image stories, led workshops where people tell their body image stories, edited body image stories for print. Doing this work for much of a lifetime, one of the many things I have learned is that while your story is not, is never, cannot be my story, your story nonetheless overlaps and strengthens and connects to my story in hundreds of places.
So that takes us to Roxane Gay, who has perhaps written the most powerful body image story ever told. Having made that statement, let me say what I don’t mean:
Gay, as she is extremely careful to stress, is not the victim of The Worst Trauma. She is precisely aware of her privileges and the ways she is lucky.
She is not, and is not trying to be, a stand-in for every other fat woman; her story is her own, not mine, and not anyone else’s.
Hunger is not a book about miraculous healing, or a road map for other fat and/or traumatized women to find healing.
The book has no new information, and doesn’t contain much that is surprising to someone who inhabits the world of fat activism.
What makes this book such a punch in the gut is that Hunger ranks high among the most nakedly honest books ever written. Whether Gay is reliving the story of her childhood, talking about her family, recounting relationships, or just telling every fat woman’s story of going to the doctor, she never for one second takes the easy way out. She never tells a simple version of the truth: the truth is always complex, thick, interwoven.
We live in a world where physical nakedness is easy currency, although its implications are extremely contextual and complicated, and the physical nakedness of fat women is fraught indeed. But Gay’s determination to be emotionally as naked as a human being can get is far from easy.
Just as everyone’s story is individual and unique, our stories all also overlap on each other. They intertwine and diverge and reconnect. And when they are brilliantly told, they reflect so much more than one person’s story. Without ever taking a moment to speculate on whether or not her truth is related to anyone else’s truth, Gay opens a window on human truth in general; she focuses unrelentingly on her own story, and by doing so models how each of us can see ourselves.
Read the book (if you can stand a graphic description of pre-teen sexual trauma, and an unflinching examination of its results). Read it whether you’re a lifetime body image activist or completely new to the concepts. Rarely will you find a book more worth your time and attention.
Lots of people (including me) will respond to this book by wanting to reach out and make a connection with Roxane Gay. If you have that reaction, and you follow through, I’m personally asking you now to make sure that whatever you send or say to her doesn’t ask for anything from her in return: not an acknowledgment of commonality, not a response, not advice, not comfort. She’s given us everything she has in this book, and you can be 100% sure that a great many readers are asking her for more, and everyone she has to turn away is a source of pain to her. Don’t be That Reader.
***
I'm not a Marvel reader, so I was missing a bunch of background which would have helped me understand the graphic novel Black Panther: The World of Wakanda written by Roxane Gay, Yona Harvey, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rembert Browne, art by Afua Richardson, Alitha Martinez, and Joe Bennett. I'm still having some trouble figuring out who the good and bad guys are. (Maybe the movie will help?)
Anyway, the story itself is what you'd want from a Roxane Gay-written graphic novel (all kudos to her co-writers; I have no idea how they split up the work): layered, thoughtful, suspenseful, and erotic. I'm clearly going to need to read more in this series and in what I understand is Ta-Nehisi Coates' related series. But I hesitate to spend much money on graphic novels, which don't take much time to read for what they cost. (And they're not in my idiom, though I have come to appreciate them more and more over the years.)
***
Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is Becky Chambers' first novel, and in some ways it reads like one. It kept reminding me of the TV show Firefly, plus aliens (which are so much easier to do in books than in motion pictures). The two qualities that struck me most were the friendliness of it, i.e., how quickly I grew to feel connected to the characters and want them to do well, and Chambers' ability to make her aliens truly alien. In particular, fairly early on a couple of the aliens on the ship muse about how weird it is that humans place so much value on being happy, as if there was no value in the rest of the range of emotions. (I think this is actually more true of Americans than of humans, but it nonetheless felt like the kind of thing aliens might say to each other when humans weren't around.) She also has an alien whose pronoun is "they," and she (I suspect intentionally) uses that pronoun very differently than the gender-fluid/agendered community uses it, which was both disturbing and interesting.
One reason the book felt like a TV show is that it is very episodic. Some stories do build over the course of the book, but each chapter still feels like a complete story about one character, which is more or less finished by the end of the chapter.
I can pick nits here and there, and I don't especially love the episodic style, but I'm hooked, and will certainly read the next one. (Note to
ladyjax : I did really enjoy this, and there is some mildly interesting gender stuff, other than Ohan's pronouns, but if I had been on the Tiptree jury, I would have wanted something with more centrality of gender.)
***
A handful of my very favorite writers and essayists leave me with only two questions, "Why didn't I say that?" and "How do you say things so well for me?" Rebecca Solnit is one of them. (Laurie Penny is another.)
The Mother of All Questions is the third of her short Haymarket books of essays. I loved Men Explain Things to Me and I still haven't read Hope in the Dark, though I seem to have acquired it three times in e-book. This one is interesting in part because it tackles the #metoo issues from before the recent cataclysm, in an essay that lauds both Aziz Ansari and Louis CK, both of whom have since been tarred with the #metoo brush. Nonetheless, Solnit was (as we all do) working with the facts she had at the time, and writing with her usual clarity, wit, patience, impatience, and grace.
The title essay is about the ongoing insistence of interviewers and questioners to ask her, and all childless women, about why they don't have children. Most of the rest of the book is about issues relating to sexual harassment, rape (and rape jokes), and the power and lack of power of women in the world. She is admirably careful to continually bring in the related issues of race, gender identity, disability, and other marginalizations, while still staying focused. Her "80 Books No Woman Should Read" and its sequel essay ("Men Explain Lolita to Me") are especially pointed and valuable.
Even when she isn't writing about hope, Solnit gives me hope in the dark.
***
Currently devouring The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, which I read the beginning of in a proof copy in a friend's house. Bedside reading is The Left Hand of Darkness, and will probably be mostly Le Guin all year.