IN MY REMAINING YEARS

A humorist and former rapper contemplates her mortality in 18 essays.

“Getting…deathy with it” was South African native Grae’s way of coping with the impermanence she was forced to accept from an early age. After moving with her parents from Cape Town, she spent a “feral” New York City youth smoking too much “terrible weed” and witnessing violence, all of which led her to a preternatural acceptance of death. What she experienced also led to a determination that she would never allow herself to “die young from capitalism and misogyny.” With sardonic eyes that see the life ahead of her as “remaining years,” Grae muses on the severe burnout she endured from years of grueling work as an independent rap artist; the “assimilation trauma” that partly stemmed from being the South African girl her Black friends would claim wasn’t a “real African”; and the “patriarchy stress disorder” from living in a culture that revealed its misogyny through its disdain for her work as a rapper and its silences around female health issues like perimenopause. Her keen sense of humor and an abiding love of the fashionable and totally outrageous are the survival tools she celebrates throughout the book. Even as she imagines her own funeral in the closing essay, Grae demands that future attendees dance, cry, wear a “fabulous scent,” and look their most decadent in “caftans…trailing sheaths and billowing gowns.” By turns raw, mordant, and hilarious, this book will appeal not only to Grae’s fans but to readers with a taste for quirky and intelligent personal writing touched by the surreal.

A fierce, funny book that embraces life and all its imperfections with open arms.