This is ultimately an essay collection that more or less reads like a memoir. This is also the audiobook and it’s read by Morgan Jerkins herself, and given how intimate some of the essays in this collection are, that is the best version of things. She talks about her sex life, her physical body, and her experience within that body and while an accomplished reader could bring a lot of life to it, it would feel strangely off. In addition, the unfortunate effect of that is that it does make this feel more like a memoir than an essay collection, and that intersection between which of those two things this book represents is an important question for a lot of reasons. I have a bigger issue in general with something that I consider a fairly glaring (I want to saw flaw, but more so) transgression in this book.
The question of the position of the author in this book is back and forth. She starts off stating pretty emphatically that she is part of a larger discussion, and in some cases a continuance or progenitor of some readers’ education (a claim that speaks to me of some youthful cockiness that I think is present throughout, in mostly good ways). She also emphatically states that she does not represent blackness and black voices because those are not monolithic. And fair enough. But then she positions her own experiences and biography as the representative Black voice in this book. Her stories are her own, but then she reads them through broadcast political analysis, which does kind of universalize them. It belies the sense of her thinking. None of this is an issue, but in a book where you’re the protagonist of every story (minus one or two) and you’re the picture on the cover, and one which you’re the center of the analysis, it’s hard to maintain the idea your experience is not universalized (in the limited universe of American Blackness). So if this is the attempt, it’s not really what makes it on the page.
My one actual criticism is that book in multiple places (at three I can think of off the top of my head) erases the experiences of other women, based on how she experiences things. Specifically, she makes the incredibly dubious claim that white women don’t experience the kind of middle school torture of sexual assault by boys. It may very well be true that Black and Brown girls experience it far worse (both her argument and not her argument), and that from her experience in her middle school that was the case, but this was a moment where I said aloud “Well, that’s bullshit”. And this is different from other moments where Jerkins correctly points out how the added extra layers of oppression what Black women face through race, color, and body that white women simply do not have to deal with, but this moment and a few others (including saying not only that white women do not get street harassment as much Black and Brown women…a claim that may very well be true, but needs supportive evidence, but also that the harassment that white women that she’s citing does not represent real harassment [ie she downplays the specific moments]). I think these represent some problematic elements not just in this book, but in wider conversations that do reduce others’ experience oppression where some additional layers of privilege can otherwise insulate those oppressed people. It’s almost in an attempt to show how much more complex the situations of Black women are than the narratives that follow them culturally cause reduction of others’ experience as a result.
(Photo: https://hazlitt.net/authors/morgan-jerkins)