Timely, unapologetic, and intense, in all the best ways.
A young Black woman bares all in this candid collection of personal essays on self-discovery, injustice, and more.
One of the privileges of Whiteness, Kaudo observes, is “emotional range without consequence.” Black women who express their anger can face dire consequences, but the author doesn’t hold back here. She articulates her rage, which is rooted in pain and frustration. She recounts the process of putting that rage in check the way many Black people have learned to do as a matter of self-preservation. She mines her memories, detailing how she’s navigated the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype and the treacherous waters between “invisibility” and “hypervisibility” over a lifetime of being the only Black person (or one of few Black people) in all-White spaces. Ultimately, Kaudo writes, “we are digging to the roots of a silenced history: a womanist and activist culture—a promise to reclaim the dignity of our mothers.” These essays, many of them experimental, explore an eclectic range of topics, including the author’s generation’s anxieties about adulthood, the sanctity of natural hair care, grief, cultural appropriation, and whether God is a Black woman. With unflinching honesty and vulnerability, Kaudo documents her journey to becoming her bolder self, to fight “the active erasure happening to blackness and black people” and the racist double standards and brutality of this nation. The author, a dark-skinned woman, reveals, “I’ve never found myself beautiful…no one’s ever called me beautiful.” Some of the most powerful and breathtaking essays in the collection (“Me, My Fat, and I,” “Thunder Thighs,” “Messy: Brief Notes on Body Positivity,” and “For Your Pleasure”) focus on beauty standards, sex, self-love, and body image issues. Kaudo is a highly self-aware work in progress who doesn’t have all the answers, but she has chosen the most interesting questions to grapple with. The result is a deeply intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls and women.
Timely, unapologetic, and intense, in all the best ways.Pub Date: April 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5818-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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