book review newsletter 01: Kiley Reid, Madeline Pendleton, & more

my written full-length reviews of 5 books I've read in January so far— Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Anne Elizabeth Moore, Come an...Show more

book review newsletter 01: Kiley Reid, Madeline Pendleton, & more

Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes

Anne Elizabeth Moore

++Xander Marro’s++ interior illustrations/cover are so excellent. Also why I picked this book up.

I cried at the last few essays. Contemplating death in its ordinariness, its emptiness of meaning, the way we treat sick people and how chronic illness screams in loneliness and pain and robs you of yourself, any semblance of positivity and hope in humanity and your loved ones—Anne Elizabeth Moore writes about this with the depth and sorrow and bone-deep tiredness of a person who lives and breathes the contradiction of life at the edge of medicine. ‘A Few Things I Have Learned About Illness in America’ broke my heart. Mundane, universal, yet totally isolating, Moore addresses us as readers directly: “Your friendship is probably over once your friend beats cancer. You will help them do that—survive—but your only reward will likely be that knowledge. You may, later, go through cancer treatments yourself. It is possible that you will do this alone. Even if you sit with three different friends through cancer treatments.” (149) Moore starts this essay, a listicle that begins with brutal truth that slaps us in the face with how much it hurts, with a confrontation on how much being a human being is about holding pain, your own and other’s, even though you know that they would not do the same for you. But Moore’s writing falls flat when she adds to the end of that picture she vividly paints of a reality she conjures that draws on the experiences of many, past present and future, with an inane and somewhat smug statement—“What is important to realize is that you helped them survive because you are good at survival.” (149) Here, the direct address no longer works for me. But in point 8, the strength of her voice reemerges with a vengeance: “Most will avoid you. They do not want to deal with mortality, yours or their own, or what strikes them as worse than death: frailty, weakness, disability.” (154) Moore goes on to illustrate the way you will lose your best friend and the community you supported in their avoidance of your illness. It is tragic and brutal and all too real. I am both the “you” and the “best friend.” I do not know whether that is Moore’s intention or not.

While beautifully and heartbreakingly writing about disability, chronic illness, and the social existence of living at the precipice of death, Moore’s writing and analysis falls short to me for the same reasons why it is so strong and deeply moving to me. The shared intimate experiences and personal perspective Moore delineates are crucial underpinnings to her work; there’s a direct line drawn from the alcoholic physician father of her childhood to her adult disabled self’s mistrust of doctors. This mistrust is crucial for the safety of disabled, chronically ill, and other marginalized people’s safety in seeking healthcare. The medical establishment does not give a fuck about women! And what is “the medical establishment”? It’s the people on the other end of the phone Moore talks about in ‘A Brutal Recounting of My Current Anxieties.’ (308) It’s the opposite of the snake oil, the ‘Fake Snake Oil’ Moore recounts buying in Texas. But it contrasts to the ‘genuine’ snake oil Chinese migrants in the 19th century were selling that had actual healing properties and perhaps combated the olfactory racism of hostile whites around them.

Something I appreciate is the American-ness yet sprawling locale of the setting in these essays. Something I’m skeptical of is Moore’s semi-confrontation with her own whiteness and privileged background. It’s interesting to get the glimpses of her South Dakota born-on-a-reservation white childhood that we do get, her feminist confrontation of others’ desire for her to create white children, and the observations of Cambodian labor organizing during her time as a journalist there. But her focus on Trump, evil sexist Republican figures, and the overrule of Roe V. Wade throughout the course of this whole text speaks to the myopic perspective of whiteness, of white womanhood, of liberalism and its conception of capitalism and white supremacy. “Capitalism” is literally in the title of the book, and while yes, Moore interrogates it in her essay examining initiatives surrounding labor organizing in the modeling industry (a bit obvious in all of the observations, in my opinion—of course feminists deride models and their labor for their role within a patriarchal culture industry, of course it’s difficult to organize such a disparate and competitive group of very young women, etc.), and in looking at the relationship between female inventors, patents, copyright law, and reproductive autonomy, she never seems to confront the element of capitalism broadly as a theme head on in any of her essays. It’s the specificity of that task struggling against the highly specific nature of the ideas in each essay.

When a woman’s legacy is brought into question, we look for her children, not her books, though she may have published dozens. Moore knows this firsthand, all articulated in ‘Cultural Imperative.’ To be a woman under capitalism, a female worker, pushes you into a reproductive role that ultimately subsumes the productive role all workers fill. When a woman’s invention is a menstrual product for a target audience of mostly women, it is not considered an ‘invention,’ but rather merely an extension of the work her body was made for. Yet the blood we shed monthly must be contained in the name of ‘sanitation’—in reality, for men’s comfort. (Cecilia from Twitter needs to read ‘The Shameful Legacy (& Secret Promise) of the Sanitary Napkin Disposal Bag.’) Moore takes this to task, articulating the former through her own experiences and the latter through brief outlines of history, unshed from what many likely do not know. Is that a worthwhile endeavor in itself in writing? Probably.

But the jokes that the title refers to don’t seem to show up much, in my opinion, in many of these Wikipedia-entry-like recaps of cultural legacies that Moore attempts to interrogate. Perhaps those paragraphs and pages of vaguely interesting reports are needed to couch the observations that really do matter, such as: “The message embedded in the product’s very existence is as gendered as the restrooms in which the bags are most often found, a wordless reminder to all who identify as women that the monthly waste of menstruators must be prebagged, a clear indication that it is more disgusting than all other forms of waste combined.” (39) In some of her essays featuring lengthy descriptions of histories and factoids, Moore effectively pulls back the curtain on menstruation products, cancer research funding, and the history of the standardization of time, for example. I truly learned a lot!

Moore changed and moved me with her writing in quite a few ways. In my journaling, I will no longer be writing the exact time of my journaling, but rather the general time of day instead. Scientists’ and train companies’ manipulation of time meant that the social interactions requiring people to ask each other what the time was were eliminated, significantly altered and affected the fabric of society. Many people were very unhappy about this scientific and capitalistic intervention in their lives. ‘On Leaving the Birthplace of Standard Time’ makes some sideways commentary on the shift in time-based mores with different cultures around the world and then within COVID-19.

It’s this sideways commentary at the core of the essays throughout analyzing cultural texts, from horror films and women’s roles in them (abysmal, of course) to a Margaret Atwood novel, where Moore kind of misses the mark for me. She soars in commentary and reveals her personal experiences in so many details and regards. Moore does not hold back, but it also allows us as readers to see exactly what she is missing. Like in her treatment of the word and identity “queer,” which is indicative, to me, of the millennial trend towards using the self-identification of queerness for vague, unspecified, and non-textually robustly present purposes. Broad, generic strokes gestured to but largely unexplored beyond a sentence or two of “queerness” in her queer crip identity that Moore explores in a vaguely titled ‘The Present of No Presence’ sits uncomfortably with me, as a lesbian with disabled and chronically ill lesbians in my life. Positing queerness as an expansive approach to sexuality in its orientation describing attraction to all genders—essentially making the words “bisexual” and “queer” synonymous nearly exclusively—is a trend in contemporary writing from feminists not coming from lesbian-feminist spaces that really irritates me. This detail that probably doesn’t bother many other people irritates me even more because most of Moore’s jokes do not land for me.

I think analysis of horror as a genre from queer, feminist, etc cultural criticism perspectives just do not jive with my brain. While I am not a major horror genre consumer, I am a major literary and cultural criticism consumer. Obviously. Moore’s writing and thinking and experiences moved me to tears, changed the way I confront the world, and have pushed me to reconsider illness, its role in my life and with others. It falls short in the ways I have detailed, but please keep in mind that I am focusing on a lot of the critical for the purpose of being critical, because so much of what I have not explicitly identified here have been truly valuable and interesting. Moore writes in a casual, largely unacademic, genuine voice. Her work is polished, thought-through, and backed by her decades of experience writing, reading, thinking, living, dying. Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes is worth your time.

1/1

Come and Get it (major spoilers)

Kiley Reid

Following her wildly successful debut novel Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s book Come and Get It once again tackles the intricacies of female life when coming of age and through the mundanity of totally wild circumstances that amble their way into your life. This time, the vivid setting of choice is Fayatteville, Arkansas, which Reid writes as being at once idyllic and pastoral in its Southern charm and kind of depressing, like all college towns. Come and Get It also takes place in a vibrantly alive contemporary setting of the 2010s that seamlessly integrates technology into the lives and circumstances of characters. Reid approaches technology in her writing in such interesting and incisive ways—the inciting incident within the first chapter of Such a Fun Age lives within the contemporary cultural moment of viral videos of racially motivated incidents, the active subjects of them often having minimal agency in their virality. Come and Get It also explores the nature of online experiences, identity, and public image shaping people’s relationships, but in a more grown-up way.

Reid uses nuance and care in her articulation of all of her characters. But specifically with Agatha Paul, a visiting professor at this Southern university trying to get some space and peace of mind after a breakup with her dancer ex who she happens to still be married to, Reid carefully paints a full picture of Agatha as a woman informed by every major event in her life. They add up together to create the person she is—the ultimate circumstance of every human being. Agatha’s questionable behavior and genuine firmness of self only comes with the fact that she is 38 years old, someone who has lived enough life to write multiple books about academic subjects of interest and have an agent breathing down her neck to get some new publications. But this time, her agent has a shifted target audience, one that focuses on attracting social media users and youth. Come and Get It lives in Agatha’s past and present while she bends the morality and ethics of researching and writing while doing the work of researching and writing. It’s almost effortlessly done, smoothly integrating every aspect of her identity and navigation of her circumstances of life into the questionable but also, to her, reasonable decisions she makes.

By following three main characters, loosely attached to each other until they are drawn together more securely as the narrative continues, via a third person narrator close within the mind of these women, we get an understanding of how all three people are flawed products of their environments and circumstances. They shape each other as they share a university ground space and dorm wall separating them. Millie, the Black 24 year old RA saving to purchase a house and finish up university; Kennedy, the white transfer student who can’t seem to make any friends at college (she’s so real for that and was uncomfortably relatable in her anxiety and lonesomeness by the way) and whose mom, whom Kennedy exclusively refers to by her first name, constantly refers to Kennedy as “Sis”; and of course, Agatha, a white academic with a Black ex-girlfriend/current wife tentatively working on a book about weddings, which quickly turns into writing essays about college girls, namely Kennedy’s suitemates.

Kennedy’s suitemates, the next door neighbors of Millie, are incredibly engaging and realistic college students, girls from wildly different backgrounds who all just happen to share a living space. Millie’s RA coworker friends are also incredibly engaging and realistic university student workers. One of the most interesting and striking moments for me was when towards the end of the novel, Millie says to her two friends—the only people in the novel she regularly has meaningful interactions of actual conversations with beyond Agatha— Do we have to tell each other everything? To which her friends just stare at her. Piercing! A true reflection of young adult/college life.

Meanwhile, the involvement between Millie and Agatha reveals the nature of the complex and obfuscated power dynamics of age, experience, and identity, present between the lines for the characters but explicitly drawn for the reader. By the time Agatha reveals the power she has exerted over Millie, it is far too late. The way she attempts to backtrack or make up with Millie for the way she has taken advantage of her and the intimacy they have built together illustrates something difficult to contend with for many people living in our contemporary world: we are responsible for the inadvertent and passing dynamics we build with the people around us in our lives. There is no way for us to avoid the circumstances of being human, that is, the ones that require us to share our spaces and our minds and bodies with the people we both invite into and, by happenstance, have in our lives. This is evident and clear no more than with Jenna, Casey, Tyler, Peyton, and Kennedy’s shared dorm space. It’s a brutal recounting of American college life that is nearly funny in its searing accuracy of the minute dramas that feel immense to a 20 year old girl, the psychodrama of leaving the dishes in the sink shockingly blowing up Kennedy’s life as a state university student for the second time in her college career.

Each character-focused alternating chapter sinks us more deeply into Agatha and Kennedy’s psyches and pasts. Reid reveals more and more details as the book progresses about the circumstances that led to Kennedy’s transfer to Arkansas, and with it, her unlikely but ultimately obvious tie to Agatha. Kennedy’s neuroticism and lonely depressive spiral across the semester leads her to purchase more and more useless things at Target, a habit her and her mother have routinely indulged in over the years. Kennedy’s character was the most frustrating for me to be immersed in as a reader in this way; before we understand Kennedy’s past, we see her present. And in her present self, Kennedy’s inability to make friends or be sociable, over-stuffed single dorm room, and the detail of her minor but continual accumulations of items throughout the semester while she exists in the periphery of the suite she lives in was incredibly irritating for me to read. Kennedy felt like a spoiled, unselfaware, overly anxious person whose lack of effort and success was of her own accord. It’s an ungenerous reading of her character, of course, and we get a more sympathetic understanding of her position and identity as just an average girl from the Midwest as the chapters progress. But man is she annoying.

Kennedy is nowhere near as annoying and mean-spirited—she’s more pathetic than anything touching cruel—as Tyler, whose presence throughout the book was truly infuriating. Agatha’s apt perception of Tyler’s identity and selfhood was satisfying to read because Agatha’s general distance from the lives of these college girls provided a removed perspective that was needed in a book so full of intimate and close observations of these young women’s day-to-day lives and interactions.

Reid’s dialogue of all of these characters was incredibly distinctive, accurate, and strong, in my opinion. Her writing of the way college students talk in the snippets we hear in the hallway and through Kennedy’s quiet observations of and eavesdropping on her suitemates and the RAs identifies the youthful voices of college girls in comparison to Agatha’s adult perspective, Millie’s older yet still somewhat stilted way of communicating, and Kennedy’s awkwardness and repression of self. A major part of the strength of Reid’s characterizations is found in her dialogue. The things each character says, outrageous or ordinary, stilted and expectant or comfortable and identifiably genuine, allows for the contrast in tone between characters’ perceptions of and interactions with each other to shine through. The misunderstandings that drive much of the plot, misunderstandings that are loudly identifiable to the reader if not the characters, culminate in such an extreme messiness that just works.

It’s a messiness that is unsettlingly realistic in its conception and depiction, a fraught tension of young adult life that Agatha observes somewhat at a distance, until she is sucked into it herself, that compels the plot forward into a direction that was obviously being built towards and set up for but is surprising to the reader nonetheless. So much of Come and Get It interrogates the distance between expectation and reality, desire and consequence, others’ perceptions and self-perception, and it really comes to fruition in the climactic scene that brings Millie, Kennedy, and Agatha all in the same room towards the end of the novel.

When Peyton, the only Black student in the suite and possibly the entire dorm hall that Millie is responsible for, gets fed up with Kennedy leaving her dishes in the shared kitchen sink, she takes Millie’s roundabout advice from the beginning of the novel to put the dirty dishes in Kennedy’s room. Of course, at the end of the novel, Millie denies ever giving Peyton this advice; in truth, she did not actually direct Peyton to put Kennedy’s dishes on her bed, but spoke about how in a previous situation Millie oversaw, one of the suitemates resolved the conflict of the other suitemate constantly leaving their dishes in the sink by putting them in the offending suitemate’s room, and that suitemate never left their dishes in the sink again. Millie sort of shrugs this story onto Peyton, who later blames Millie when telling Kennedy why she left her dishes on Kennedy’s bed. This scene, dramatically tense and hyperrealistic in its portrayal of the dynamics of roommate conflict as navigated between young adults who struggle with following through on tasks as well as meaningful confrontation and conflict resolution skills, results in Peyton and Kennedy both holding onto a pizza cutter, pulling at it from both ends. Peyton and Kennedy’s warring perspectives and defensiveness peaks here, their misunderstandings of each other flying off the rails as the wheel of the pizza cutter flies off the hinge and slices through Kennedy’s wrist.

Incidentally, Kennedy was in the midst of suicidal ideation in the hours following up to getting home and then sitting on her bed to find that her dishes had been left there by Peyton, who had suffered nearly an entire semester of Kennedy not following through on the roommate agreement set up at the beginning of the year of everyone cleaning and putting away their own dishes before someone else has to use the kitchen. In their subsequent argument, Kennedy gets angry at Peyton for bringing this fact up, not seeing why it’s ‘that big of a deal’ (or something) and is irritated that Peyton had bothered her all semester about her habit (one that inconvenienced Peyton.) As the reader, I see both their perspectives and am sympathetic to both of them, having inhabited Kennedy’s experiences for the whole book up to this point. Peyton is remarkably unapologetic and unselfaware in the aftermath of Kennedy’s injury, and does nothing to challenge the assumption that Kennedy’s cut was partially her fault. It somewhat ultimately ends up serving Kennedy however, because the sympathy of people in her life, or who were previously in her life before a traumatic event that was somewhat her fault but was mostly an accident, ends up showing up after her seeming-attempted-suicide.

Of course, as the reader, we know that that is not what happened. The situation is much more complicated than that, but also, very simple. Kennedy’s overwhelming depression leading up to the suicidal ideation in the moments before this argument with her suitemate that ultimately turns nearly fatal (on accident) was triggered by her rejection from Agatha’s creative non-fiction writing seminar. We also know from being in Agatha and Millie’s perspective that Agatha didn’t even read the application that Kennedy, who reread her letter out loud three times on the phone to her mom, sent in, saying that any application that began with “Hello, my name is…” was immediately put in the reject pile. When Millie sees and glances at said pile, she does notice that Kennedy is one of her residents and comments that Agatha’s technique of filtering out submissions seems overly harsh, but ultimately forgets about that interaction and moves on. Many moments of life operate as such, where people don’t connect the dots at all and have no reason to, because it doesn’t really affect their own life. (Until it does.)

In the haze of blood loss and Peyton having a panic attack outside Kennedy’s door, Agatha and Millie show up at Kennedy’s side and attempt to mitigate the situation, commanding Kennedy’s suitemate to call 911, where Casey, in her deep Southern accent, hilariously describes the situation to the emergency operator as an “attempted-murder suicide.” Casey, Jenna, and Tyler’s privilege seeps off the page into Agatha’s writing, where she gets commissioned by Teen Vogue to do ‘Money Diaries’ of these college girls. Her ‘reporting’ is highly edited eavesdropping from Millie’s room of the suite next door. Agatha’s arrangement with Millie helps Millie work towards the down payment on the house she’s trying to buy—Agatha has no shortage of money and pays Millie $40 a week to be able to sit in her room and listen in on Millie’s next door neighbors, the suite girls. The whole setup of the situation between Millie and Agatha, which turns into a sexual relationship, and the dynamic of Kennedy struggling at college with existing at the periphery of her roommates’ friendliness, all so closely packed together within the pages of the novel and in the spatial limitations of a college dormitory, provides a suffocatingly intimate examination of people just trying to get their shit together, and failing miserably.

I think Reid brilliantly navigates the financial minutia and character traits of all of the characters that populate Come and Get It, and it’s exciting to see her writing grow and jump off the groundwork of her style set in Such a Fun Age. _Come and Get It _is as intricately plotted as Such a Fun Age, with the themes of complicated relationships between adults, coming of age and working jobs that are not necessarily the most fun or fulfilling, and how chance interactions are mediated by financial, racial, and personal-history-based dynamics are fluid and vibrant in both books. Come and Get It is explicitly queer and deals primarily with the relationships between women while Such a Fun Age is so compulsively readable due to the class and race dynamics surrounding heterosexual relationships. It’s an interesting avenue for Reid’s sophomore novel to go down, where the queerness of the novel prevents her writing with similar themes as her debut from becoming stale from book to book. It also offers a more complicated yet simpler situation of predatory power-imbalances in relationships—that Agatha is a woman allows her to access closeness to these college-aged young women in a way a man could not. That Agatha takes advantage of this under the guise of her work, while insisting to her peers that her relationship with Millie is morally acceptable because Millie is not her student and is older than the average undergraduate, evidences the morally gray dynamic at hand.

None of these characters are irredeemably ‘bad’ or villainous; they’re just people. In that way, perhaps Reid is more generous towards them than I am as a reader. A wider cast than in Such a Fun Age, there’s no hyper-focus on a character as easily hateable as Alix, who is a delusionally liberal white woman racist with fantasies of grandeur within the scope of her own limited reality. But there are the constant offhand comments and casual comparisons to the Holocaust and refugee crises that the suitemate white girls make while complaining, joking around, and going about their days that Agatha ultimately records and platforms on Teen Vogue. Without telling any of these girls or asking their permission to use their eavesdropped words, of course. In all of this, Reid does not write Millie as a character who is being naively manipulated, but rather as a person who has her own reasonable motivations and thought-processes for the actions she takes. Perhaps her most fanciful characteristic is her imaginings of her resident director Josh, a fellow Black staff member whom she fantasizes about having a future and life with before and during her affair with Agatha.

In the reviews for Come and Get It, Ellen Peirson-Hagger of The Guardian ++writes++, “The novel builds to an unfeasibly violent dorm scene. In exploring the financial anxieties of young women, Reid gives just attention to an important but rarely examined topic. But her depictions too often feel like farce. And what’s the point in that?” While to Peirson-Hagger, Reid’s satire falls short in her writing of these characters, I think that the perspective that she snugly occupies while describing the world she has built deeply informs the way her words play out. Pierson-Hagger notes that Reid’s style is sometimes “laughable. ‘It didn’t make a lot of sense but Simi looked like a backpack,’ she writes in one inane description of a student. ‘An Aerosmith song came on from the overhead speakers, the one where he doesn’t want to miss a thing’ is a later line, which is just asking to become a meme. What’s more, Reid’s rendering of Casey’s Alabamian accent (the author was born in Los Angeles) feels mocking in its relentlessness: ‘Hah there … Ah’m Casey. Ah’m a senior at the University of Arkansas … and Ah’ll be 21 this Saturday.’” I think what Pierson-Hagger fails to consider is the fact that Reid is writing from the third-person perspective of characters who are already biased for or against many things, and their thoughts on and recollections or observations of people ultimately reflect on their own character. When Agatha is meeting Casey and she speaks to her with her thick accent (the audiobook does an EXCELLENT job at giving voice to all the sharp dialogue and strong characters Reid writes, by the way), it is through Agatha’s perspective and ears that we are hearing Casey talk. Same with the description of Simi looking like a backpack—it is Kennedy’s bitterness and implicit racism that makes her think this ridiculous thought, a thought she herself identifies as not making a lot of sense. ++Kirkus Reviews++ notes, “Reid is a genius of mimicry and social observation.” I agree. Like Kirkus says, “As an author, Reid has the very same obsessions she gives her character Agatha, and the guilty pleasure of the book is the way she nails the characters’ speech styles, Southern accents, and behavior and her unerring choice of products and other accoutrements to surround them with.” It’s the details of the facemasks Kennedy buys, the opening description of Casey, Jenna, and Tyler wearing faded oversized t-shirts and biker shorts, one of the final scenes where Agatha picks up Tyler in her car and Tyler is holding all of her items in her hand and not in a bag. Yes, I do the latter too, and yes, it also exasperates my mother.

Additionally, by describing the scene between Peyton and Kennedy that constitutes the climax of the novel as “unfeasibly violent,” Pierson-Hagger misses the mark in understanding what Reid is doing with the book. The dorm scene is necessarily “unfeasibly violent” because our lives, as mundane as they may be, are filled with little violences that ultimately culminate in very dramatic situations for many of us. How many times have relationship-ending fights started over the dishes? How many roommates have had falling outs over not having compatible living habits? It is the mundane that becomes totally absurd in ways that we cannot even begin to predict or fathom in the moment, and can only somewhat reflect upon in the aftermath. It is articulating these crossroads where Reid’s writing thrives. All of the reviews speak to Reid’s ability to describe and observe the reality of human interactions.

The Publishers Weekly review of Come and Get It says: “Overlaying the narrative of Agatha’s clandestine project are backstories of the principal characters, which gradually reveal sources of their ongoing pain and push the story to an explosive climax. Reid is a keen observer­—every page sparkles with sharp analysis of her characters. This blistering send-up of academia is interlaced with piercing moral clarity.” I’m not sure whether the moral clarity is there for me, rather than a thorough exploration of the moral grayness inherent to being human. We see Millie beat herself up for letting her RA duties slip as she furthers her involvement with Agatha, and we see the way Kennedy contends with the aftermath of an event that was deeply traumatic for her, but for us, as the reader, is just a mistake that someone could reasonably make in a moment of panic.

For The Southern Bookseller, Kat Leache ++writes++, “I didn’t think Reid could top Such a Fun Age, but am THRILLED to be wrong. Come and Get It has everything I loved about her debut (her ear for dialog is unparalleled, and she does realistic social cringe so. well.)” Leache writes, “Her characters are ALIVE. The public university setting is priceless and allows Reid room to exercise her WICKED sense of humor as well as explore the transition pains most of us go through in our late teens and early twenties. Some — like Agatha and Robin — are experiencing growing pains well into their thirties. _Come and Get It _is so very funny and so very generous.” I don’t think that the humor of Come and Get It is going to work for everyone; I didn’t think that it would work for me either initially. I hate when the humor of writing comes exclusively from a sense of cringe that the characters embody, because I think one of the most delightful things to read is characters who fully embody themselves no matter what, in any circumstance. The side characters of Casey, Tyler, and Millie’s fellow residence life coworkers bring that humor to life, unselfconscious in ways the cringeyness of Kennedy’s actions and sometimes Millie’s decisions, and oftentimes Agatha’s approaches to her life, cannot accomplish.

All the reviews of Come and Get It identify Reid’s social observational writing as detailed and highly aware of and informed by the political circumstances of our world. But I would argue that Reid’s writing is much more subtle than a lot of the other fiction on the market. She explores the complexity of race and gender and class within the nuances of each of her characters’ inner worlds, as well as through her characters that revolve around the main characters. It is the absurdity of the situations these characters find themselves in that brings this book to the level of realism that it has, as well as the humor and satire of it. That was true for Such a Fun Age, and is true for Come and Get It. Like Reid’s debut novel, the title of this book does an excellent job of speaking to the core of the story, while never actually showing up in the text of the novel. (Unless I have that wrong and these phrases did show up in these books.) The title of Such a Fun Age ironically speaks to that experience of being a wandersome 20-something who is in fact, not having a fun time at her age, as she juggles having multiple jobs and a new, kind of questionable relationship, while her friends all seem to be settling down and pursuing ‘real jobs’ and careers. Meanwhile, Come and Get It embodies the chutzpah our characters either lack or possess. “Come and get it” could easily be a cheer you could hear at a college sports game, and it's advice you could give or take. Indeed, we see the consequences for taking the advice of “come and get it” for all of the characters. It’s brilliant, it’s funny, and only falls short of a five star read for me because of vibes. Nothing against the book itself— It’s Not You, It’s Me. A title of my book reviews.

1/6

Some of My Best Friends

Tajja Isen

Voice actress, editor, holder of a law degree, Canadian, writer— Tajja Isen’s debut book features essays spanning industries and generations, but mainly focuses on the very present moment (politically and socially) and the culture industry (mostly in terms of writing and publishing.) The narration is light, humorous, witty, and incisive. It’s a takedown-from-the-inside from the voice of a woman with years of experience in the voice acting industry, as well as experience in the publishing world, the journalism world, and the legal world. I’m stuck between identifying the introductory chapter’s opening paragraphs as being on-the-nose in a fun way and not thematically encompassing enough of the whole collection. Sometimes essay collections do better without an “introduction.” Let the work speak for itself!

I want to do a ranking of all of the essays in this book, just for fun, but first, I’m going to do a recap of each essay in the collection, from beginning to end. Each essay's title itself is pretty clever. With a title like Some of My Best Friends, no one should be surprised at the recurring themes of post-2020 liberal race politics in the corporate world and culture industry, the nature of writing about oneself and existing in journalism/publishing/writing today (amidst our online world and such and such), and how all of this ties back to and sprouts from the experience of growing up as a precocious Black biracial girl in Canada, voicing cartoons.

*Note: my page number citations are not going to be accurate or consistent because I’m using the Everand ebook as my reference for quotes in writing this, which adjusts the page count according to screen size and text font.*

“Hearing Voices,” the first essay in the collection, describes Isen’s personal experiences with the voice acting industry as it has changed in the past few decades. Specifically, what it means for her as a Black voice actor when the industry decides that casting white voice actors for Black cartoon characters is no longer acceptable, re: Jenny Slate in Big Mouth. Nine year old Isen switched from on-camera casting calls (unsuccessful) to voice acting auditions (successful, but at what cost? “Can you do that a little more_ street_?”) For adult writer Isen, the separation between portraying the voice of a cartoon and the cartoon character itself was always something interesting, special, and good. An invisibility she liked. So when the wave of social justice initiatives in 2020 hit the voice acting industry and there was a call for Black actors to voice Black characters, Isen asks, “What Black characters?” Throughout the essay, Isen tries to interrogate how “race in cartoons works pragmatically, subversively, and improvisationally” (24) and recounts how Jenny Slate’s post announcing her resignation from Big Mouth was “sent to several Toronto-based voice actors like some sort of cursed chain letter (Send this to five BIPOC or you’ll die of being racist in seven days!)” which made me laugh. But she ultimately lands on the point that casting more Black voices or faces in an industry short of Black talent in the writers’ room is a hollow gesture, while also explaining that it’s bad to ask Black people to do extra unpaid labor of extracting and explaining their own experiences of being racialized in the industry so the industry can get better. What is the history of Blackness on screen in cartoons? Its history, its implications, the idea of the ‘Black voice’ itself? Isen explores all of this while drawing upon many previous essays and works discussing these large ideas, bringing different points back to her own personal experiences in the industry. By the end of this opening essay, Isen says of the voice acting industry and race, “I want subversion.”

“Tiny White People,” the second essay in this collection, recounts Isen’s relationship to books, specifically the anglophone mostly white and male canon, in the context of her childhood and coming of age in the conservative white Toronto suburbs, where she inevitably stood out while trying hard to fit in. A common story for many a racial minority in an all-white environment. Basically, Isen parallels the experience of trying to fit in with whiteness and how that manifested as her trying too hard at being ‘one of the boys’ in her writing, ultimately producing mediocre pieces with unmemorable white characters. College-aged Isen was working hard at being a literary great in the white male literary canon sense, writing about things she did not know in order to create something she wanted to create. Isen’s younger self firmly believed that her own experiences were not worth writing about, and when she tried, it became evident how, in her words, “My taste far outran my talent.” Isen’s older and wiser self prods at the dynamic between Black writers, their writing, and the (white) public, invoking Toni Morrison and James Baldwin while she’s at it. There’s namedrops of and elaborations upon Franzen, Nabokov, Carver— “the greats.” She brings in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning as well, which pleased me! As a Black writer, Isen cannot escape being Black as a writer, something she identifies relationally through the “little white man” at the bedrock of her literary self-education. Part of what she cannot escape is exactly what I am identifying her and her writing to be, and something I feel pressing on me as well: “The smaller your share of power, the more people your art may be mistaken as a mouthpiece for: Your gender, your culture, your country. Some writers accept this burden as their political duty. Others find power in being a mouthpiece and it’s not a mistake to read them that way.” (63) Part of her younger self’s rejection of writing about herself or anything within her own range of experiences that she thought were ultimately trite, not “the stuff of literature,” was her obsessive reading and indoctrination into the white male literary canon. But she acknowledges that she was also trying to write against this expectation. Now, Isen has worked towards identifying her own voice, and I think this book is a pretty tremendous embodiment of it.

“Diversity Hire,” the third essay in Some of My Best Friends, opens with Isen recounting a scene from the TV show Archer. (I have not heard of this show until now. But I have heard of The Office, which she then goes to also mention!) With the specter of corporate liberal inclusivity politics, Isen identifies the actual politics of diversity in the corporate world, especially with the post-2020 racial reckoning that seemingly shook up these institutions. In discussing “performativity” in the Sara Ahmed and Judith Butler sense, Isen notes how corporate diversity statements make the act of saying a company is doing something be the act itself, collapsing action with sentiment; this is something we are familiar with. How many times have people sneered at the concept of ‘performative activism’ online? Isen interrupts this by hashing out the online discourse surrounding the meaning of performativity itself, before talking about affirmative action court cases. The real win in any of the pro-diversity cases was ultimately capitalism, with major corporations and employers and labor unions, from the AFL to ExxonMobil to the military, on the docket supporting affirmative action. Isen draws upon the apt conclusion, “Diversity was no longer about facilitating cultural exchange for a good education, but about building a more efficient workforce.” (81) This is where she first introduces her experience at law school and getting a job after. (Absolutely horrific, obviously.) Being the “diversity hire” means getting saddled with the job of having to fix the shit you suffer from while being the savior of the institution you’re in, which does not give a fuck about you. Isen speaks to how your actual job as the “diversity hire” is to get more “diverse people” in the door, not settling into your role as The Diversity Hire who brings the diversity just by being there, and knowing that the company DGAF.

“This Time It’s Personal.” Personal essays, and white women saying that their personal stories and narratives in the personal essay form are politically cogent in it of themselves. Literary navel gazing is feminism? Writing about your wounds and the ways you’ve been harmed is important in many manifestations, but Isen takes it down and apart with the Jia Tolentino essay about the death of the personal essay towards the beginning, citing it as very misread. An insight from Isen that I found so compelling was how she explained the nature of the production and consumption of personal essays from the perspective of the media entities: “One’s personal story should bloom around suffering; that suffering is inextricable from being alive and minoritized; that giving such pain a platform is inherently moral; and, perhaps most significantly, that consuming it is evidence of a higher goodness.” (96) Smart, true, funny. The nature of the industry of women’s personal stories and what people want to read from white women versus Black women relates back to Isen’s artistic coming of age articulated in “Tiny White People.” Black people’s lives are not worth writing about in serious literature, but when Black writers do write about themselves, it better explain the history of racism and elaborate in detail upon all the minute cuts and deep slashes it’s made on the writer, for the eyes of the ostensibly white reader. After Isen’s cutting observation, “Cat Marnell might get a reported six-figure book deal for chronicling her sex life and drug use, but a Black woman would publish “one successful, gutwrenching piece somewhere, and then hear ‘no’… until [she’d] exploit personal trauma ad infinitum,” (101) Isen gets back to talking about her childhood. Middle class, suburban, and average, she eventually evolved into being an online writer flaying herself on the page, making money writing after graduating from law school with no job, until it was no longer bearable. It’s burnout, but more like being traumatized by having to constantly do trauma-dumping for your job. Isen’s articulation of Black writing being described as being “about identity” goes back to and probably spawns from Zora Neal Hurston and W.E.B. Dubois’ experiences as writers, the tiresomeness and pain they felt in trying to articulate Blackness to white audiences in each of their works, or at least, the expectation for them to do that. In the contemporary journalism world, Isen’s role as an editor also offers her a unique role to critique the culture industry. She says, “The problem with creating an audience hungry for pain is that you have to feed it constantly.” Then she talks about Alicia Elliott’s book, A Mind Spread Out On the Ground (which I’ve also read! I get pretty excited whenever writers reference recently published books I’ve also read) by pointing out the grossness of the_ New York Times_’ (the New York Crimes*) review reducing it to cliches of the supposed inherent tragedy of indigenous life or something. Basically, what happened to taking writers of color seriously as writers, as artists engaging with their craft in unique, innovative ways, beyond just their capacity to be vehicles and avatars for the voyeur to feel better about themselves for consuming art about others’ pain. Art about pain is good. But art should be good. As artists and people who consume art we should see and produce work not just entirely about/by/for pain but for the technical, artistic, and aesthetic expressions. This is a reminder that we all need, I think.

“Some of My Best Friends.” Ahhh. The titular piece! We start with white women, white womanhood, white femininity. What is it, why is it, how is it etc. Glennon Doyle talking about how feminism excludes women like her (???), then young Isen’s experiences getting into Tori Amos and Fiona Apple and trying her own hand at songwriting. She discusses the show Girls, and the idea of a singular and piercing female pain expressed in media and its relationship to feminism. Drawing upon critiques identified in the previous essay of the idea of political power being found in female vulnerability, fetishizing melancholy, and the idea of women being maudlin as itself revolutionary, Isen both critiques and embraces the form this takes in art. “I am a member of the most oppressed group to ever live. I am so attractive and successful that feminism doesn’t even want me. I have all the feelings. I am the wound.” Hilarious and cutting. Then, it’s 2016. Feelings and YA and personal essays are bad now?! That’s not right either. I love that Isen brings up Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana documentary and how she fits it into this argument, following it up immediately with the fall of Ellen Degeneres. This essay is so chock full of cultural references and cited sources, everything from My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Big Little Lies, that I wonder— why is the title of this essay that discusses so broadly the cultural media landscape surrounding female artists/characters/pain, feminism, and the whiteness of it all titled what it is? To me, this essay has the weakest title of the collection, somewhat lacking the clever ties to themes articulated throughout the specific essay that the others so clearly do, which makes it an interesting choice for it to be the title of the collection. Isen seems to be saying, yes, white women are “some of my best friends, but…” and the rest of the essay continues. It’s not quite as focused as her other writing in this collection, I think.

“Barely Legal”—another clever and great title, in my opinion—explained to me how I would probably flop if I went to law school. “Going to law school was supposed to fix a lot of things.” Real! “I wanted to throw down the gauntlet when people asked me what I did for a living.” (146) In Isen’s preparations, she stopped writing, socializing, and reading for fun entirely in the six weeks before going in to sit the LSAT. Pre-CRT (the legit kind, not the white supremacist agenda to get Black history out of K-12 schools) being necessarily present in law school curricula (though what would/does that really do?), Isen was running a critical race theory book club in law school trying to desperately find some other people who gave a fuck at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. In examining the inherent injustice of the law and the racial violence embedded in it, it becomes evident what law school prepares you for: “They don’t just up and say_ today we’re gonna learn how to do some racism._ They call it ‘thinking like a lawyer.’” In school, Isen was really falling behind and getting average grades, fully not understanding case method at all, even by graduation. Ultimately, in this essay, Isen articulates both the isolation and failure she experienced in law school as well as the racism of the law itself. She ends it with discussing the class of 2023’s letter responding to an administrator referring to ‘Black cop’ being an intersectional identity while linking these issues of race and law school to the dean. This leads nicely into the following essay, which is about anti-racist demands and letters and statements.

“What We Want and When We Want It” opens with the 1969 call for reparations from James Forman’s Black Manifesto, delivered in an interrupted Sunday service in Manhattan. In response, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church “trie[d] very hard to have it both ways.” (174) Because really, Forman’s manifesto “offers a choice between two options—pay up or shut up—but the Council splinters the dichotomy into a third (love thy neighbor, but make it budget).” Isen talks about interpersonal conflict articulated in popular culture and its relationship to the lack of diversity in film, university, and politics. She discusses Robin D.G. Kelley’s “Black Study, Black Struggle,” which she encountered in law school in the only course on racial politics that was offered. (Hey! I’ve met Robin Kelley, he shouted me and my friend out by name at a talk we were at! It’s kind of a funny story… A man walked in and took a seat in front of me and my friend in the auditorium. He overhears us talking about something then asks us if he’s read the books we have with us—_Freedom Dreams _by Kelley. I say no, they’re handing out these for free at the door, pointing back at it. We just got them, I told him. He informs us that he, in fact, wrote the book.) Basically, if diversity as reform does not really work, then what about all these anti-racism pro-diversity statements that flooded our feeds? “Though these statements usually had specific and actionable goals, they didn’t always. At times, some of them could risk feeling as toothless as the corporate mea culpas they responded to.” (188) Isen argues that the existence of social media use as self-absolution for the active racism one does in the world is deeply related to the idea of the statement, the open letter. Isen approaches the open letter in its form similar to her critique in “Diversity Hire” of the performativity equalizing speech as action, when speech itself is a form of action, but public statements that don’t do anything or bring about actual change are not action itself. “What We Want and When We Want It” speaks to the more firmly online/social media driven manifestation of things like open letters being interchangeable with political action rather than demanding and seeking follow through on specific political actions: “It’s far easier to sign your name to something that lands in your inbox without reading it—an apology, an opinion, a fit of pique—and cite that document as a key contribution to the discourse of the day. The demand is not a mandatory DEI session or a request to make a toxic, profit-driven practice more hospitable. It’s continuing to chant even as capitalism is banging down the door. It’s a sudden shift in verbs from we think to we want.” Banger ending, in my opinion.

“Do You Read Me” eviscerates the publishing industry and its overwhelming whiteness, nepotism, exploitation, etc etc etc. In looking at The Other Black Girl and American Dirt as recently published bestselling books embodying the contradictions and problems of the racial, cultural, financial rife within the publishing industry, Isen then goes to discuss Severance by Ling Ma (another good book I read and Isen references! Eeek! Exciting!) as the cherry on top: “Want to tell a story about the abject horrors of surviving under racial capitalism in a world blanched by homogeneity? Give your character an entry-level publishing job.” (201) From #PublishingPaidMe to the debacle of publishers posting their anti-racism commitment (lol, still minimal, as evident in the actual stats Isen brings up) statements while slating to publish like, Kyle Rittenhouse’s upcoming memoir, it’s racism all the way down. It’s all about the money at the end of the day. How to pull in two directions of money-chasing at once?! Of course, the nature of the industry and its whiteness deeply shapes the books we read and the literary world we live in. But getting this close, accurate, and jarring of a look of it all was indeed, quite unsettling. By the end of the essay, Isen makes this searing point: “It’s possible for the industry to lower its barriers to entry, slowly but steadily rebalancing the resources that have long been concentrated in the hands of wealthy, white New Yorkers. But the central fiction—that the world of books will bend naturally toward every kind of justice—has long since expired.” (217)

“Dead or Canadian,” the final essay in this collection, is a musing on Canadian versus American national identity, culture and patriotism, and whether or not Isen should move to the U.S., specifically New York, to further her career as a writer. She combats the idea of Canada as a liberal paradise or diverse haven, talks about her relationship with a European man named Phillip, COVID-19 surges and policies in Canada, with kind of the weakest ending to the essays in Some of My Best Friends: “You have to pick your battles or the fight will burn you out. But oh, Canada. I’m so tired.” (247) A shame that this is the ending of the book right before the acknowledgements, in my opinion.

My least favorite to most favorite essays, go! A ranking:

  1. Dead or Canadian
  2. Some of my Best Friends
  3. Hearing Voices
  4. Diversity Hire
  5. Tiny White People
  6. What We Want and When We Want It
  7. Do You Read me
  8. This Time It’s Personal
  9. Barely Legal

Isen brings together the personal/political, media analysis, pop culture commentary, and industry-insider behind-the-curtain peek at things in a way that is really quite excellent. The structure and breadth of ideas and experiences she covers manages to stay within thematic parameters of deeply contemporary racial politics and feminism in culture. Isen by and large succeeds at melding personal essay and cultural criticism, a popular genre of writing these days. Super contemporary!

1/13

Drunk On All Your Strange New Words

Eddie Robson

It seems as though others also initially read the title to be Drunk On All Your Strange New Worlds, as evidenced by some of the Goodreads reviews. While that book title would be very poetic, the actual title, Drunk On All Your Strange New Words, is much more literal to the story than our mistaken alternative.

The “strange new words” in question are the words of the aliens, whose communication is in such a different form that the majority of human beings cannot speak with them. The “drunk on” refers to the bodily experience of the translator whose job is to convey English words into the alien language, and convey alien words into the English language. Basically, when actively communicating in the alien language, the human translator experiences a feeling of drunkenness. Thus, the literalness of Drunk On All Your Strange New Words as a title.

It’s the near distant future, and you live in a world featuring telepathic communication with aliens (called Logi), hate groups of anti-alien racism-fueled conspiracy theories, glasses that function as smartphones and are always recording your experiences and surroundings—and your boss is murdered in his house where you live, because you’re his full time translator. You were placed there by your alien-language translation school, where you felt excluded and different from your peers the whole time, being from a small, working-class town in the U.K., now working in the big city of New York. Of course, like the rest of this futuristic rendition of an alien-inhabited world, New York City is full of new innovative technology that nostalgically renders and emphasizes the history of the city, architectural and interior design choices heavily leaning on 19th-21st century New York City aesthetics. As a Logi translator, you mediate every human-alien interaction between your boss, the Logi cultural attaché on Earth, and the world around him. And vice versa. It’s a demanding job, but your boss, Fitz, is a chill guy.

Lydia is a translator for Fitz, a Logi, an alien species now inhabiting planet Earth that does not have the capacity to vocally communicate or speak—thus the need for people like Lydia, educated at the London School of Thought Language (LSTL), to serve as Logi translators. As a Logi translator, Lydia is always around but mostly invisible. Until her boss is murdered in his own home while Lydia is asleep upstairs.

Lydia’s job placement with Fitz requires her to telepathically communicate in Logisi to Fitz what human words were just said to him, and relaying Logi words from their telepathic communications to the humans Fitz is speaking to. Logisi is inherently an unspoken language that requires telepathic communication, and Logis do not understand human body language or expressions, nor do they really comprehend human technology. Because they are large, strong, and humans do not know much about them, they have some level of power. But they are a benevolent presence on Earth, though many humans are quite ignorant about them, as Logi are concentrated in cities like New York, where diplomatic centers are.

The New York City police department is quite suspicious of Lydia in the aftermath of Fitz’s murder. Of course, as she was the person who discovered his body, was the only known person in the house the night of his murder, and had not heard the intruder come in at all, they hope to maintain a close eye on her and pin the murder on her. But as Lydia is navigating the whiplash of the death of her boss, someone she ultimately was close with, being at the center of a police investigation, and the chaos of the Logi diplomacy center in the aftermath of the murder of the cultural attaché, she starts hearing Fitz’s voice in her head. Very similarly to how they communicated before his death.

The unraveling of this mystery imbued through the limited human knowledge of the Logi and Logisi mediates the rest of Lydia and Fitz’s relationship as his disembodied voice tells her to investigate his murder herself. This book does an excellent job at speculating at a specific manifestation of human/alien relationship dynamics, and the cultural, linguistic, and intercommunal coexistence and dynamic between Logi and humans. Drawing upon futuristic technology that feels intuitive to a contemporary reader and building characters and a world that feels developed but not overly so, _Drunk On All Your Strange New Words _explores with nuance these ideas of translators as active intermediaries in interactions, and characterizes the aliens as emotionally realistic beings. The idea of human encounters with aliens on Earth creating new social environments that elaborate upon pre-existing human social structures and dynamics has, of course, been explored in contemporary science fiction before. Whether in Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing or Clare G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius or the Ted Chiang short story, “Story of Your Life and Others,” which was adapted into the film Arrival (2016), communication and power as fundamentally defining aspects of alien/human interaction are highly evident and popular in the media landscape. What _Drunk On All Your Strange New Words _does differently, however, while still paralleling the ideas of the aforementioned texts, is the unambiguous innocuousness of the Logi. They hold positions of power, are existentially threatened by fear mongering by humans, and yet are mostly harmless as entities, attempting to understand human culture and society while building genuine relationships with humans. We see this in the interactions between Logi and humans in the NYC art world attempting to seek Fitz’s powerful patronage, to get their work translated into Logisi and expand their market audiences.

At the crux of what is driving the mystery plot narrative of Drunk On All Your Strange New Words is anti-alien conspiracy theories, human anti-alien sentiments and existential fears of potential Logi abuse of power, and how this proliferates into corruption within the police department. The side characters of Lydia’s human lawyer (who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns) handling her case and positioning to defend Lydia from the murder allegations, Fitz’s former coworker at the Logi diplomatic center, and Lydia’s one night stand from when she went back to her hometown for a vacation visit before Fitz’s murder, all appear throughout the course of the novel from beginning to end in interesting and surprising ways, I think. I was surprised at the way my expectations were consistently upended as the plot progressed, and how deeply embedded I was as a reader in Lydia’s experiences and perspective, even while in a third person narration point of view. _Drunk On All Your Strange New Words _is compelling contemporary science fiction that incorporates a mystery into it without devolving into something cliché or without depth, in my opinion. It’s also not flashy or heavily reliant on pre-existing tropes or reader expectations of the genre or plot. But maybe that’s just me not being as much of a sci-fi reader as others more deeply familiar with the genre— perhaps this book is not as original and thought-provoking as I experienced it to be. Nonetheless, _Drunk On All Your Strange New Words _was a very enjoyable read for me, compulsively readable in the plot and pacing, and with memorable characters and relationship dynamics throughout.

1/16

I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

Madeline Pendleton

On her extremely popular TikTok account, Madeline Pendleton talks about her life, gives financial advice, and offers her perspective on the fashion industry as a business owner who is a socialist. She is a delight and basically never has incorrect takes. Madeline has learned how to navigate this world through her own experiences and often brutal encounters with the bullshit of capitalism. Generously, in her book I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, she shares those lessons she’s learned while also explaining how she learned them, taking us through her childhood in Fresno, her moves to San Francisco and Los Angeles, the shady college experience she got scammed by, the toxic and beautiful relationships with men in the punk scene she’s stumbled into, her fraught relationship with her divorced parents who were scraping by to raise her, how and why she started her clothing line Tunnel Vision, and all the questionable or great jobs she’s held over the years. It’s a book that is deeply engrossing for the same reason why Madeline’s Tik Toks constantly go viral—she has a lot of valuable insight from her years of being broke, in debt, and surviving by the skin of her teeth. But the most heartbreaking experience Madeline shares in _I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt _is about her relationship with Drew, her boyfriend whom she was deeply in love with, who tragically died by suicide. “Capitalism Killed My Boyfriend” is an apt chapter title, and she begins and ends her book in talking about Drew. In the audiobook recording, Madeline’s voice breaks as she describes her relationship with Drew, and it brought me to tears.

Madeline writes in an incredibly readable style, and moves through the years of her decades of life experience with a seamless pace and level of detail that feels intimate and personal without ever feeling unnecessary. Her financial advice is tailored for young broke people, and it’s incredibly valuable. Without condescension, she explains exactly how class and money operates in America and what we can do to survive it. What makes her Tik Tok so great is exactly why her book is so great—Madeline knows how to balance vulnerability and distance, provide important advice alongside the personal details that frame them as reliable, and get to the point while being incredibly inviting and welcoming. The way her conception of class changes over time as she gets older and wiser, how she recounts being exploited as a worker in many different contexts and situations, and working hard to not exploit other people’s labor as a business owner is conveyed not as inspirational self-help fodder, but real shit. Madeline does not shy away from explaining her moments of failure, what she learned from her mistakes, and what we as readers can take away from them. It’s a portrayal of stumbling through surviving poverty that doesn’t fetishize the rags-to-riches narrative of many financial self-help books and memoirs, while acknowledging the structural racism and violent exploitation of the capitalist American hellscape. I really enjoyed the chapter where Madeline describes the financial self-help books she herself read and what she gained and dismissed from each of them. Madeline methodically fleshes out her points exactly, but more than that, how she got there. It’s so well done.

To be completely honest, me and Madeline were mutuals on Tik Tok on my old account, @b00khoarder, which was super cool! I looked up to her and still do. She will never see this, but I truly think that she is really smart and her book is really good, and if I was still on Tik Tok, I would one hundred percent recommend her book in a video. By the very end of the book, Madeline briefly mentions her creating her Tik Tok page and how people coming across it were the people she knew she needed to reach. It’s not so much that she was an inspiration to me, but that her work and life embodied the thing so many of us need to hear in order to get through the hell of our world. Madeline’s book that traces her life story through the thing she was and is always thinking about—money—offers a glimpse into an alternative way of being, a different world, one that has hope running through it all. The alt-punk world she came of age in, the community of anarchists and socialists she grew up in, the way her fashion reselling business went from something that turned no profit into a way for her to provide everyone who works at her company cars and houses, all of that is the inspirational shit. Madeline doesn’t deify herself in writing about her life, and doesn’t present the things she went through and the lessons she learned as models for us to follow. She’s not a role model, she’s just a person who has something that other people can learn something from as they try to get through their own life. _I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt _is a book that people from any class background can get so much from. The alternative in this book that she presents almost answers the question Mark Fisher so famously posited in his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?—Yes, there is an alternative! There is a way to live and survive, while hoping for and building something that will last beyond capitalism, a better world for all of us.

1/20

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Jan 29


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