Mean

September 18, 2017
Gurba (Painting Their Portraits in Winter) forays into experimental nonfiction with this coming-of-age memoir that recounts deep trauma with remarkable swerves into humor. In brief, generally chronological but isolated stories, Gurba depicts how she slowly became aware of her racial and sexual differences during her childhood. Growing up in the 1980s in Santa Maria, Calif., as the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Polish-American father, she was acutely aware of prejudice, which she describes with a child’s disbelief in irrational unfairness. When Gurba has to stay with her white neighbors and the mom makes her what she calls a Mexican casserole, Gurba is intrigued but later fumes that she had forced down a “casserole whose nationality was a lie.” As she grows older her sensibility takes on a harder edge. She converts fraught situations into poetic, moving critiques, such as her meditation on the Catholic saintly tradition of extreme fasting and her sister’s anorexia: “By fasting, a girl ascends a throne made of bone. She stares into the face of the divine and beyond. She finds that infinity has no caloric value.” Gurba maintains her wry tone even when she pivots to discussing her sexual assault by a stranger. Her dark humor isn’t used for shock value alone, offering instead a striking image of deflection and coping in the face of real pain and terror, such as when recounting being raped, she describes her humiliation upon realizing she’s wearing her period underwear: “Girls know what I’m talking about,” she quips. These bleak circumstances doused in Gurba’s stark wit linger past the book’s final passages.

September 1, 2017
A gritty memoir exploring gender politics and growing up mixed-race Chicana.Gifted experimental writer Gurba (Painting Their Portraits in Winter, 2015, etc.) takes a hard look back at her adolescent and early college years in Southern California. A self-described "early-onset feminist," the author is deeply invested in and intimately aware of the construction of identity. As she explores with wry humor the history of her attraction to women--"I grabbed a magazine and realized boobs were the best thing ever....I was eight but I knew what I wanted"--and how the unique blending of her mother's Mexican heritage with her father's Mexican-Polish roots framed her "Molack" ("Mexican" and "Polack") worldview and influenced her studies at the University of California, she also tells the harrowing story of Sophia Castro Torres, another Chicana, whose fate was less kind. Early in the narrative, which unfolds in spare prose vignettes, Gurba writes, "guilt is a ghost," and she admits that she is haunted by the memory of Sophia, a migrant worker who was raped and bludgeoned to death on a baseball diamond in Gurba's hometown. The author not only feels compelled to bear witness to the horrific end of an innocent woman who supported herself picking strawberries and whose life was further erased by the media by being dubbed "a transient"; through the use of inverted chronology, she also slowly reveals her own struggles with PTSD--"the only mental illness you can give someone"--as a survivor of sexual assault by the same perpetrator who killed Sophia. Positioning herself as "the final girl," the one in horror movies who "gets to live" but "understands that her job is to tell the story," Gurba attempts to break down walls of indifference, whether through form or probing content. With its icy wit, edgy wedding of lyricism and prose, and unflinching look at personal and public demons, Gurba's introspective memoir is brave and significant.

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October 15, 2017
Gurba's (Painting Their Portraits in Winter, 2015) whip-smart and creative, caustically funny and wise essays make up an insightful memoir of growing up, getting an education, and discovering her art and queerness as a mixed-race Chicana girl in 1980s and 1990s California. She knew, as a Mexican-Polish preteen that she didn't fit the mold. Young people of color are supposed to enjoy looting and eating trans fats, not sustained silent reading. She wondered why the junior-high teacher who watched a male classmate molest her didn't say anything. Later, at Berkeley, she noticed that her work was influenced by Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein, though she hated them both. Sophia, a woman murdered by a man who had assaulted college-age Gurba just months earlier, forever linking them both, haunts Gurba thoroughout the book. With unconstrained, inventive, stop-you-in-your-tracks writing, Gurba asserts that there is glee, freedom, and, perhaps most of all, truth in meanness. My stream of consciousness is very judgmental. My subconscious is and always will be a mean person. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2018

Gurba's writing makes you want to know the author better. Her voice is irreverent, lyrical, and sharply observant, even as her book offers dark commentary on what it means to be a woman in American society. Here, she addresses traumatic experiences, including sexual violence that men forced upon her and against other women, disordered eating, and the cultural norms of women's beauty. Gurba's work also explores issues of race and sexuality; the author is mixed race and queer, and her narrative packs a lot into a few pages. If you believe that women, and all people, have the right to safety in public and domestic spaces, the right to control their bodies and express their gender identity and sexuality, and that prejudices of all kinds continue to impact and restrict the promise and potential of many in this country, then this is a book you'll want to read. VERDICT Gurba is a writer for our times; her memoir brings a powerful perspective. (Memoir, 10/20/17)--Rachael Dreyer, Pennsylvania State Univ. Dept. of Libs. (RD)

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