Whoa. I've read several of the Bunny Girl memoirs but this is the best one yet. The writing is so poignant and beautiful, and I was really impressed by the amount of introspection Crystal Hefner has about her life. I'll admit that I used to be really judgy. I figured anyone who was a Bunny was probably a bimbo (derogatory), and I'm not proud of that. Especially after reading this books and finding out just how smart some of these women were, and how they were forced to hide it to perpetuate the male fantasy of uncomplicated, fun-loving girls.
This memoir begins prior to her life at the Mansion, talking about the trauma of losing her father to brain cancer (which I really related to-- that's how I lost my dad), losing her first serious boyfriend, and being raped. Like a lot of the other girls, she met Hugh by chance at a club and he picked her because he liked the way she looked. Like a lot of the other girls, she talks about Hefner's narcissism and the way he used his money to control his girlfriends, and how the other girls would often fight or go behind each other's backs to stay in his favor.
Most of those memoirs were written while Hefner was still alive and I did get the impression that some of them were holding back because of that, which is maybe testament to the power he held over their lives. Crystal's memoir, on the other hand, is no holds barred. She repeatedly calls him a narcissist and talks about how he would body-shame the girls in an attempt to get them to lose weight or get cosmetic surgery. Two of Harris's procedures nearly killed her and one ended up causing an autoimmune disorder (which is ironic, because in Izabella St. James's memoir, she talks about how lucky they all were that nobody in the Mansion ever had any complications from their surgery).
It gets grosser. Apparently, Hefner was paid $400,000 per episode of The Girls Next Door and Crystal got nothing. After his proposal, when the show Marrying Hef was being produced, Hefner was getting $800,000 and Crystal got $2,500 for the whole season as a sort of appearances bonus. She claims that he had peep holes in his bedroom that he used to film himself having sex, and based on some discussions she claims to have had with him in this book, it doesn't sound like the people he filmed always knew about it. When he and the girls went out together, he would encourage them to remove clothes or flash the camera and he would take pictures with a disposable camera. Crystal talks about finding the pictures and destroying them, while going through her husband's things.
I think the saddest thing, though, was at the end, when she was going through his scrapbooks and looking at the letters he received from people who liked what he was about. There was one from an 11-year-old girl who loved The Girls Next Door and told him she wanted to be a Playmate when she grew up. She sent him a picture of herself, too (in a school outfit), which he KEPT. There were also letters, she said, from boys thanking him for teaching them how to treat women.
Crystal repeatedly says that she often felt like she didn't have any value beyond her looks, and living at the Mansion only made that worse, because she was living a lifestyle where she was forced to be a prop and was constantly judged by her looks and mocked or commented on as if she didn't have any feelings. So many reviews have questioned why these women didn't just leave, but the prevailing theme in so many of these books seems to be that they didn't feel like they could-- that the ugly side of pretty privilege meant that nobody really took them seriously, so they felt like the Playboy brand was a stepping stone to something achievable, and possibly validating.
This was honestly a pretty devastating read and I felt so sad for her and the other women by the end of the book. She spills even more tea than St. James did and it is scalding and I hope she's doing well in her post-Mansion life, because it honestly sounds like she went through five different kinds of hell.
This is a great memoir about Asian-Canadian actor, Simu Liu, and his upbringing in both China and Canada. He talks about how he got his big break (and some of the roadblocks leading up to it), as well as the struggles of being an immigrant in a new country, and the child of immigrant parents with sky high expectations whose means of punishment may seem unconventional or even cruel when perceived outside of their cultural contexts.
Simu comes across as very likable in this memoir and part of that, ironically, is that he doesn't slink from his less likable moments. One of my criticisms of the celebrity memoir is that they often feel too glossy, but he admits to coasting and then nearly failing in college, and quotes one of his ex-girlfriends' takedowns of him when he was behaving like a Nice Guy(TM) to give her seemingly callous treatment of him in their relationship the proper context it deserved.
This was just a really honest, really endearing memoir and I liked it a lot. I like the actor a lot and this made me like him more.
I thrifted this and was pretty excited to see it because I loved the title and I'm kind of a sucker for celebrity memoirs. I saw someone call this "a memoir that isn't a memoir" and now that I've read it, I can see what they were talking about. I WANT TO BE WHERE THE NORMAL PEOPLE ARE has some great elements-- like her dealing with bullying, her crush on a mean boy who ditched her when people thought they were "together," and her anxiety whilst doing Famous Person Things(TM). But then there was also a lot of really strange and not-so-interesting things, like her adolescent poetry and old fanfiction.
I would probably only recommend this to die-hard fans of Rachel Bloom. It was a little too out there and self-indulgent for me.
BIGGER IS BETTER is a fascinating read written by the late Big Ang, of Mob Wives fame. I've never actually watched the show, but it was basically a reality TV show about a group of women who were famous for being related to the Genovese crime family. So basically, "The Real Housewives of the Mob." Apparently a lot of them have memoirs out, and several of them are on KU. This was one of them.
I wasn't sure what to expect with this one and it was much odder than I expected. It actually, bizarrely, has a fairly similar format to THE RULES ACCORDING TO JWOWW, in that it's like a combination of recipes, life advice, memoir, and random observations. Kind of like an R-rated version of Seventeen magazine.
She was a very interesting woman and if you get this book for one reason, get it for the anecdote about the bat that flew into her 36JJ boobs and immediately died on impact.
Maggie Shayne recommended this book to me before Twitter became the bad place, and I bought it immediately and then put off reading it until I was watching TikToks and saw chels_ebooks quote Anne Stuart's essay from this very collection and basically fell in love.
DANGEROUS MEN AND ADVENTUROUS WOMEN is a very dated collection of essays. It's from the early 90s, and as other readers have pointed out, it's both heteronormative and white. And yet, despite all of that, it's very interesting how many of the gripes that plague Romancelandia as hot takes now were still as hotly debated twenty-plus years ago: romance makes big money but isn't taken seriously, people don't realize that the rape elements of bodice-rippers and romances with forced seductions are a form of CNC because the act of reading is itself consensual, and perhaps most infuriatingly, outsiders to the genre refuse to understand the genre conventions or what makes the books appealing. I also thought it was interesting how many of these authors claimed that the heroines really didn't matter as much as the hero, because based on many criticisms I've seen of contemporary romances now, that seems to be true. Readers are far more likely to write off the heroine as irrelevant; it's the hero's actions that drive an MF romance.
Anne Stuart's essay was an easy five stars. It made me realize that I would happily read an entire collection of essays from that woman herself. She, more than any contemporary author I've read, understands the appeal of the villain and what drives women to want to tame the seductive menace of a man who really doesn't mean them any good. Some of the essays I liked less, although I found it interesting how important virginity is to these authors (and their readers). One of the authors said that when she started writing non-virgin heroines, one of her readers actually took the time to write into her and complain. I also found it interesting how against "the feminists" some of these authors were, because it mirrors the hostility that so many dark and spicy romance authors and readers have now towards "the purists," who are busily shaming people for reading and enjoying spice as if it were some sort of moral deficit. According to some of these authors, feminists are doing the same. I guess it just goes to show about how "tHeY'rE rUiNiNg ThE gEnRe" is always going to be the rallying cry whenever there's change, and how sexism itself is far more insidious and long-lasting than most people would probably be willing to admit.
P.S. Anne Stuart, please write a collection of essays about romance. I would buy the shit out of it.
This a memoir written by the ex-girlfriend of ex-District Attorney, Eric Schneiderman, who was later accused of abuse by several of his exes, including the author of this book, Tanya Selvaratnam. In this memoir, she writes about how they met, and how his abuse escalated, and what her experiences of living with intimate partner violence were like. Apparently this made pretty big news. Trevor Noah even included a joke about it on his show, because it was considered pretty scandalous that a high-up political official forced his brown girlfriend to participate in master/slave play. She obviously found the joke very distasteful and wrote in to complain, for which she received an apology.
I loved this book a lot. I think she did a great job showing how you can enter a relationship with wide eyes and not realize that your partner is an abusive person until it's too late, because of course we want to forgive the people we love when they hurt us in the hopes that they won't do it again. It was wonderful to hear about the people in her life who worked hard to validate and support her, and get her story out there when she needed it. I also loved that she made the effort to point out that some of the behaviors that happen in abusive relationships can be totally fine in a consensual kinky relationship, but the difference is consent, respect of boundaries, and mutual enthusiasm. That's a distinction that not all memoirs like these bother to make.
Some people complained about her privilege but I think it just goes to show how even with a huge support network, money to spare, and an established career, you can still get suckered in by master manipulators and they can still make it very hard to get away. The racial component is also a valid one, too, and she does point out that brown and Black women have good reason to be leery of law enforcement officials when it comes to making reports of abuse.
The intersection of feminism and pop-culture is one of my favorite topics because so often, when we see popular opinion pieces about pop-culture, the story is told from and about the cisgendered (and mostly white) male perspective. TOXIC was of particular interest to me because I came of age in the late 90s/early 00s, and that shit was toxic as fuck. I am still to this day unpacking some of the harmful messages that I ended up internalizing during that time period. And I don't think anything shows those unattainable and shameful standards for women quite as well as how the media talked about certain celebrities, who either couldn't or didn't want to follow the "rules."
I have mixed feelings about TOXIC because while the subject matter was interesting, the way the author talked about some of these women left a bad taste in my mouth. Take the Britney chapter, which dates itself because it came out pre-Britney memoir: the tone of the essay, while sympathetic, feels patronizing; and in retrospect, some of her remarks about Britney feel quite callous and at times even cruel, such as her analysis of the music video "Everytime." Ditum seems to take it as a mournful song about a breakup, but now we know that it's a heart rending ballad about the abortion Justin made her get that she wasn't allowed to talk about.
The section about Paris reads more positively, but suffers the same limitations because it also came out pre-memoir (her most recent one, I mean; she has two). I liked this chapter a lot because I really like Paris Hilton and I think the author, to her credit, really manages to capture how clever and self-effacing Paris is. However, the essay about Aaliyah was painful to read. Mostly because the focus of the essay is not so much about Aaliyah herself but how she was a victim of grooming. R. Kelly is more prominently discussed in this essay than she is, and the way Ditum talks about her, like a helpless martyred waif who was frozen in time like a bug trapped in amber, made me so upset.
I don't feel like the Amy Winehouse and Kim Kardashian chapters were very well done at all. Neither of those essays really capture how dynamic and conflicting those women are. Kim Kardashian seems to be a celebrity that people really struggle to write about because I've noticed this is a theme in other celebrity-focused books I've read. I think it's really difficult to juggle the fact that while she portrays herself as a selfish and vapid celebutante, she is an expert deflector, and she and her mom have turned their name into both a brand and empire. She also is the recipient of a metric ton of shit talk. The way people talk about her and her body (particularly during pregnancy) can be so traumatic that I am honestly in awe that she can leave her house without crying (because that is what I would be doing if it were me). Amy Winehouse was a similar recipient of that level of hate, especially in the late aughts and early 2010s. And, like, I really don't think this essay captures how she was basically destroyed by her fame; addiction almost felt like her way of self-medicating from the stress she received from being in the public eye and that is devastating. It feels very Valley of the Dolls, which basically had the message that the standards are women are such that to make do, you have to be drugged up... or perish trying.
I didn't really care about the two essays on Jennifer Anniston and Chyna, so I skimmed those.
TOXIC said some interesting things and reminded me of some very disturbing aughts trends that I'd half-forgotten (like Tila Tequila), but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you are just really interested in 2000s celebrity culture and want to read about it in a book that almost seems to emulate the same gossipy tabloid formula that it sets out to criticize.
I bought this like ten years ago, back when I was SUPER obsessed with nonfiction. I still like nonfiction but now it feels like a chore to read and I have to be in the mood for it, unless it's a memoir or one of those really poppy books about science.
THE MEDICI GIRAFFE is a book that sets out to explore how animals have, historically, been used as displays of power. It starts out with Alexander the Great's fascination with elephants and their potential for use in his armies and ends with William Randolph Hearst's private zoo, plus an epilogue that sort of skirts around China's use of pandas in global diplomacy.
This book's biggest flaw is that the topics are not cohesive. Apart from the chapters being about rich, powerful people who kept animals (or slaves-- more on that in a mo'), the people they talk about are pretty different and it didn't feel like there was a unifying theme.
So here are some bulleted thoughts.
Alexander the Great's chapter was one of the best because I loved the idea of this dude creating a two hundred strong herd of elephants that he then couldn't be fucked to train. Elephants scared horses and also men, so the armies that had them, had to have handlers who got the horses used to them and were adept at managing the elephants. But Alexander had so much conquering to do that he didn't take the time. They were basically useless. The Ptolemaic dynasty kind of feels anticlimactic after the elephant hilarity, but I did get a kick out of Ptolemy's younger son literally having a name that means sister-fucker because he married his sister. Loooooool. The Greeks apparently hated that and thought that was super gross (lots of gossip about "unholy holes"). I think he's also the guy who put statues of his mistresses everywhere. HILARIOUS. I love that kind of gossip.
Did not care at all about the Roman chapter that followed. Booooring.
Lorenzo de Medici's chapter was mildly interesting. Basically, he was like "fuck you, I'm a Medici, I own a giraffe."
There was a guy from Europe who owned a lion named Rudolph but apparently lions weren't as cool. I wished the side note about the Chinese emperor who told people to stop giving him lions as presents because he had too many was the main chapter. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in ancient China when the emperor was telling everyone that lions are totally last season, you guys. 11/10 would watch.
Josephine Bonaparte was apparently a crazy bird lady. She had so many birds. She had a lot of other animals too but then Napoleon got pissed off and told her to cut it out. The fact that she cheated on her asshole husband and had a ton of spite-birds made me like her more than I already did. After Alexander the Great's chapter, Josephine and her black swan army was the best chapter.
William Randolph Hearst's chapter was weird. The tone almost felt fangirly in parts but this guy was not a nice person. Also, his zoo animals seemed to be pretty badly treated, so that made me sad. I don't want to read about how he didn't listen to the zoo employee he hired to evaluate the health and comfort of his diseased and anxious animals (spoiler: he wasn't sliving for protection against animal cruelty) or how zoo visitors and zoo EMPLOYEES tortured the animals for fun. The only thing about this chapter that I liked was the fact that Charlie Chaplin apparently got a goofy grin while looking at zoos. YES.
The chapter that made me most uncomfy, however, was the "Human Animals" chapter, which was about Hernan Cortez and his colonization of indigenous Mexicans. I don't know, guys, something about writing about human slavery and sticking it in a chapter in a book about animals being used for power gives me the ick. Cortez was an asshole. The only good thing about this chapter was that it made me want to rewatch The Road to El Dorado, which is an excellent movie.
The epilogue about China's panda diplomacy was OK. Vox has a video about it which is way better. I don't think we like pandas because they remind us of ourselves. I think we like pandas because they look like black and white teddy bears who eat leaves.
Overall, this book was OK. I'm not going to keep it but I learned a lot of interesting things that I never learned in my history classes back in school. BRB, adding Road to El Dorado to my watch queue.
Well, the book certainly lives up to the title in the sense that it made me consider Keanu Reeves. I had actually forgotten how many movies he was in, including offbeat titles like Dangerous Liaisons and Little Buddha. This is sort of a biography (a very lite one), but it's also a fan letter to Reeves as an actor and a human being.
I enjoyed this book but parts of it were too silly. At times it felt like the authors knew they were running out of material and were scrambling for more filler, case in point: the quizzes, and the bizarre little Keanu fanfiction short story they randomly crammed in here.
Would recommend this to fans of Keanu Reeves, but anyone else probably shouldn't read this book. At the very least, it might prompt you to revisit some cheesy old movies, though.
I bought this impulsively because it was on sale. MOSHI MOSHI is absolutely adorable. Winnie Liu is an illustrator who was lucky enough to have the chance to study abroad in Japan when she was in college. In this heavily illustrated travelogue and memoir(?) she details some of her adventures, gives recommendations, and spotlights a few of the many cultural differences between Japan and other parts of the world.
I was lucky enough to go to Japan a few years ago and I've been to several of the places she talked about here. It made me incredibly nostalgic for my trip. Would definitely recommend this to anyone who is looking for vacation ideas. Especially if they love cute art.
If you loved the Barbie movie, then you need to read this book. Carol Spencer was one of the head designers of some of Barbie's most iconic outfits, having worked at the company from the 60s all the way through the 90s. Part memoir, part Barbie fashion catalogue, this book follows Spencer through her childhood and college years, into her work for Mattel. She talks about working in Asia for two years, where she partnered with people in Malaysia, Japan, and China, and also how the oil embargo of the 70s impacted the production of Barbie clothes.
A lot of these Barbies predate me, but the late 80s, early 90s ones brought back so many fond memories! I also loved how feminist and inspiring this book was. I guess Spencer was engaged to this dude who was under the impression that she would work to pay for his med school, and when she got accepted into the college of her dreams and told him that she was planning to pay for her own schooling and that he should do the same, he DUMPED her. #TakeThatManOutToTheCurb
I just loved this book so much and there's tons of amazing photographs of Barbies, some of them quite rare, most of them from the author's private collection. My eyes welled up a little when I found out that she got a Barbie of herself for her retirement, holding a little bouquet of flowers. I want a Nenia Barbie. :( It just goes to show that for all the criticism Barbie gets, she has been inspiring to so many girls and women. She certainly was for me.
A HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE IN POPULAR CULTURE is a beautifully chaotic mess that deep-dives into the vampire mythos, tying it to actual science (rare diseases and processes of decomposition that "mimic" vampirism), goth culture, queer culture, and even actual historical figures who were slandered posthumously (most notably and infamously, Elizabeth Bathory). This is also an analysis of pop-cultural phenomena, starting from the gothic lit of the early Victorian era and ending with modern-day Dracula movies.
I thought this was wonderfully fun. The interviews with famous goths about their thoughts on vampires was quite entertaining-- she actually managed to track down and interview one of Bram Stoker's living relatives! Is it cohesive? No, but the wandering narrative is part of its charm. So many times while reading this, I found myself taking notes and thinking that Fenn seemed like the type of person that I would just love to be friends with. It was especially fun seeing vampires being discussed from the Gen-X goth lens, since vampires are goth in every sense of the word.
I'm a little surprised that she didn't bring up Fright Night (either of them) or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, though. I feel like Fright Night marries the horror and sex elements of the vampire quite nicely (well, in the original), and I think it's an even better vampire movie than Lost Boys. Likewise, Chelsea Quinn Yabro's St. Germain is a long-suffering, good-hearted vampire, who kind of feels like a direct response to the flamboyant deviancies of Lestat. They were contemporaries, too, and-- I imagine-- just as crucial in shaping vampires as mainstream, romantic figures. I definitely felt like there was a Dracula bias in this book, because it seemed like this author was curating vampires based on what she enjoyed, and while that's fine, people who are hoping for a more broad and impartial scope may be disappointed.
Overall, though, this was amazing. I'll definitely be keeping this for reference. :F
I think this is the fourth book of Gay's I've read and as always, she doesn't disappoint. Her books always feel so raw and emotional, but they're written as if you're looking at her words through the other side of a clear glass wall: removed, but with a full view of whatever terrible or beautiful thing she decides she wants to show you.
This book removes that barrier.
HUNGER is probably her hardest book to read, although it's a close call with UNTAMED STATE. This is a memoir about the body: what it means to take up space (especially as a tall, "super plus-size" Black woman), what it means to hunger-- for food as well as acceptance, and how in our desire to fill up the emptiness inside us we sometimes turn to darkness. In this book she also discloses her rape, and the lasting effect it had on both her mind and her body, and how it shaped her sexual relationships in an irreversible way.
She says at several points that she doesn't want to be defined by what happened to her and I fully understand that. When I think of Gay, I think of an honest book reviewer and a phenomenal writer. But sometimes, with celebrity figures, we forget that there's a man (or person) behind the curtain with very real flaws and insecurities. I admire Gay for her bravery in sharing what it means to be a human who has gone through terrible things, and hearing her thoughts on how society contributes to structures that continue to facilitate these inequalities and injustices.
I hope this memoir brings other people comfort and makes them feel less alone.
MEN WHO HATE WOMEN is a very good book, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the incendiary title is a little misleading. The focus of this book isn't really about women-hating men so much as it is about alt-right groups that aim to target men who feel uncertain or terrified by shifting paradigms of masculinity and gender rights, and essentially scapegoat and dehumanize women-- often in the abstract-- to gain what they see as a toehold in the fraying fabric of society. But that title isn't as catchy. :P
Laura Bates, through exhausting research and even some undercover stints, discusses some of the primary groups that are responsible for these regressive stances on sexuality and gender roles, including pick me girls and impressionable teenage boys. She also discusses some work that feminist men are doing to further quality, and how some men who were once caught in the crosshairs of these movements ended up having changes of heart (and she shares their stories, too).
This is one of the most disturbing and upsetting books I've read in a while and I would urge people to be cautious reading if they are sensitive to violent language aimed towards women. I can't imagine what sort of headspace the research for this book might have put the author in at times, and I hope she indulged in some major self-care after finishing. I think this book is informative but probably not transformative. Looking at the reviews for this book, it seems like MEN WHO HATE WOMEN will appeal most to people who already believe in feminism and just want better talking points for understanding and repudiating the other side.
I would have given this a higher rating but it ended up being a bit of a slog. Parts of the book felt very repetitive. The "Men Who Fear Women" chapter, for example, was very similar to the MGTOW chapter, and there were a lot of arguments that felt very circular, even though I agreed with them. However, I still appreciated this book a lot, and I'm grateful for the work that Bates is doing to both highlight the inequalities and abuses many women face as part of their day-to-day lives while also trying to be inclusive towards men and boys, showing how sexism hurts men as much as it does women, often in sadly ironic and unexpected (for the men) ways.
I recently watched Tara Mooknee's YouTube essay, "The anatomy of a 'girl's girl' (& when it turns toxic)," which is an analysis of the trending TikTok topic of girl's girls, what they are, and what they represent within the broader cultural sphere. While reading FRIENDS TO KEEP IN ART AND LIFE, I kept thinking of that video, because I feel like the humor in this book is basically targeted towards the types of girls who think they're girl's girls, unironically.
This was fun but not as good as MEN TO AVOID IN ART AND LIFE. It did get a good chuckle out of me though so it gets at least a three star rating.
Oh man, I remember American Apparel. I never shopped there, though. At my high school, it was what the "slutty hipsters" wore and I did not listen to nearly enough Arcade Fire to be able to shop there. I do remember seeing the ads for the shops, though, and being like, "Huh. Awk." There's actually an opinion piece from some reputable magazine that compared their ads to softcore porn.
In STRIP TEES, Kate Flannery, an ex-spokesmodel for the company, talks about living in LA in her late teens and early twenties, working for the infamous teen clothing brand. She compares it to a cult, and I think she may be on to something, because the complicit silences and closing of ranks that happen in a toxic workplace environment really can appear similar to the mass-brainwashing of a pseudo religion.
I LOVED this book. If you told me one of my favorite memoirs of the year was going to be about a clothing brand from my childhood that I never wore, I would have lol'd. But here I am, spitting facts: this is a snapshot of a bygone era and a #MeToo story, as well as a voyeuristic insight into the rise and fall of a once-powerful company.
Here's the thing: I am super nosy. I don't know if any of you young people still read fashion magazines, but when I was in my TigerBeat, CosmoGirl, Seventeen, Elle phase, I lived for the sections in these magazines where Real Teen Girls Would Tell Their Real Teen Stories™. Sometimes it would be written out like a Medium article, and sometimes you'd get a section in the back with girls (or maybe guys/nonbinary people, idk, it was anonymous), confessing their totally most cringiest moments, Dear Abby style. I still remember some of my favorites, like this one about a girl who popped out of her tube top like a champagne cork out of a fizzy bottle. Or the girl who decided to let it go in the pool, only for the pool chemicals to turn her urine purple.
This book is basically that, in book form. I don't actually know who the LadyGang is, but I guess they're podcast hosts, and in this collection they have confessed some of their own sins, in addition to crowdsourcing more from their listening audience. I got hooked into this book through the introductory essay, Poopnique, about how Jac apparently sits on her toilet like a gargoyle with her feet on the seat to poop. That set the stage rather nicely for what was to come.
I do agree with the arguments that the podcast hosts were the least interesting in terms of stories. Jac's were usually great and Becca had some good ones, but a lot of Keltie's were just Hollywood humblebrags masked as "oh my god, so embarrassing." Which I wasn't mad about, but it wasn't exactly cringe as, say, the lady who took a laxative pill to unblock herself and ended up on a multi-day poopscapade that ruined $4000 of underwear and linens. Or the crime writer who sent a business card of herself with a photo to a serial killer she wanted to write about in prison, only to find out that he'd, I guess, traded her photos for candy with other inmates who were only too happy to write to her.
There's something very voyeuristic about this collection in a way that kind of reminds me of the PostSecret era of found content. I do agree that women should be able to talk about a lot of the "taboo" subjects in this book and that it isn't fair that so many things are acceptable for men to talk about (pooping, farting) that everyone will shame women for. So I think in that sense, this exercise is rather progressive, and also contains stories that will make people think either "wow, there really are no unique experiences" or "now I don't feel so alone." It was a brisk and interesting read but I didn't get much out of it beyond that.
I thrifted this book recently, which was really exciting for me because I remember really wanting this book when I was in my edgelord hipster phase and none of the stores around me carried it and then I basically forgot about it for years and years and years until I picked it up this weekend, saw the VICE publishing imprint on the back, and was like, "Oh, hey, it's you."
Here's the thing. Normally I don't like reading people's diaries. People are rarely as interesting or as clever as they think they are, and packaging something that was written for your private introspection and selling it to the public usually results in broken hearts all around. I know some people don't feel comfortable rating memoirs because it's someone's life... but at the same time, as soon as you slap a price tag on that little piece that you're selling, it becomes a consumable good, in a sense. At least in that framing.
DEAR DIARY is actually pretty decent for what it is and what it's trying to do. I think what makes it better is that Arfin posts her diaries as excerpts and then follows up with commentary from her now, often interviewing the people she was writing about and asking them why they did what they did when they were kids, and what they're doing now, and asking for their perspective, etc. It reminds me of this video I saw on YouTube where this person tracked down people who unfriended them on Facebook and then asked why they unfriended them? And I was like THANKS I HATE IT, but I cringe-watched it anyway.
What I liked best about this book though is the portrayal of the '90s and '00s alt culture, and what it felt like to be a grungy, edgy kid who didn't quite fit in. The pop-culture references were so much fun and even though I couldn't relate to the drug stuff at all, I loved how this felt like a period piece. It's like a weird and fucked-up time capsule and I think I might quasi-stan.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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