Mean

Finalist for the 2017 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Mean calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish -- and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. --The New York Times Gurba is something of a connoisseur of cruelty. She doesn't pull her punches, but her jabs are calibrated with a perfect balance of rage and satire. --The New York Times [Gurba's] 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. --Publishers Weekly 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. --Kirkus Mean demands our attention not only as a painfully timely story, but also as an artful memoir.... a powerful, vital book about damage and the ghostly afterlives of abuse. --Los Angeles Review of Books With unconstrained, inventive, stop-you-in-your-tracks writing, Gurba asserts that there is glee, freedom, and, perhaps most of all, truth in meanness. --Booklist Gurba seems intent on tearing down walls and shaking readers out of complacency; her writing pulls our attention to human cruelty, suffering, and then, resilience. We are better off for it. --BuzzFeed [Gurba's skill] here is apparent in the way she demonstrates her own gradual maturing through her developing thoughts and sense of self. --Literary Hub [Gurba's] politicized consciousness comes not only through her college education, but also through the stories of the women who don't survive the violence that women of color encounter on journeys similar to hers. This is a startling and edgy book from start to finish. --NBCNews She tackles everything from sexual violence to racism with humour and directness. --ELLE UK [Mean is] gorgeously written--beautiful, forthright, honest, and just a little bit mean, and I loved every minute of it. Gurba's is a voice we need to be listening to right now. --Book Riot Gurba explores the stark reality of her suffering as she creates solidarity with other victimized women. Her story is a powerful one, and her voice is certainly one that earns readers' attention. --BUST Mean will make you LOL and break your heart. --The Millions Gurba uses the tragedies, both small and large, she sees around her to illuminate the realities of systemic racism and misogyny, and the ways in which we can try to escape what society would like to tell us is our fate. --Nylon [Mean] is a book that commands you, pushing and pulling you with the author's expert language and voice, haunting you long after the pages have ended. --Atticus Review The book is a study in the utility and limits of niceness, especially when it comes to being a nice girl--and the political power of being mean. --Pacific Standard Don't let its slim profile fool you, this memoir bursts with vitality and humor (however mordant), all while dealing with issues of gender politics, sexual assault, PTSD, and Gurba's experience growing up as a queer, mixed race Chicana in California in the '80s. --Nylon Through her unpredictable style, Gurba offers a welcomed antidote to the formula of the contemporary novel. --W Magazine Gurba tackles hard subjects and ugly adolescent intimacies in short sentences you'll have no choice but to read out loud to strangers and repeat to yourself, quietly, later. --Kenyon Review Hauntingly, beautiful, and refreshingly blunt, Gurba's Mean is an open door through which she invites you to experience her life, in all its beauty and struggle. I suggest you walk through it. --Harvard Crimson The difficulty and the joy of reading Mean is diving deep into the murky Molack waters with Myriam Gurba. --Bust Not one to mince words, this Lambda Literary finalist [Myriam Gurba] nevertheless aims to entertain as she tackles racism, homophobia, and sexual violence in this amusing genre-defying celebration of strategic offensiveness. --Logo [Gurba's] 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. --Library Journal Honest and darkly funny, the book is riddled with moments that will have you nodding, cringing, and crying right along with the author. --Harper's Bazaar .. .as [Gurba] veers from biting vignettes to poignant verse and back again, she shows reverence for both saints and bitches, arguing that nastiness can be more than just a defense mechanism. In a cruel world, it sometimes offers us the catharsis we need to keep going. --OUT Magazine Gurba's experience as a spoken word poet shines through in her colloquial quips and clever turns of phrase. It's not an easy feat to inject wit into such a heavy subject matter, but Gurba does so with tact. --Lambda Literary Review [Gurba] breathes fire and Spanglish, batters you with her biting humor then buries you in truths you cannot look away from... This is how memoirs should always be written - with fierceness, brutal honesty and a wry smile cutting through it all. --Brightest Young Things Bruised but exuberant, Gurba's brash voice eschews any sanctimonious overtones... With this unashamed, raw perspective, Gurba views her life as a means to demonstrate how a person can be reduced to a mere body, nothing more than an object of desire. --BOMB Read Mean for its humor and stimulating structure. Read Gurba for her unique perspective and literary stylings. --PANK Mean is pure Gurba: brazen, ballsy, and grinning. But Gurba's first memoir is also poised to be a breakout book--a work that, like Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water, will likely catapult its author out of the small world of experimental-ish short fiction and into a much larger readership. --4Columns .. .[Mean] sets itself up as a challenge -- to empathize, to tell the truth and to stay awake to the violence done to women (and minorities) every day, and the various ways in which our society works to erase their dignities and identities, not to mention their bodies. --Star Tribune Gurba's artistic sensibility is so fresh, her wit and observational skills so acute, that she defies all expected tropes and story structure. --Dallas Morning News For its unapologetic examination of trauma, for its witty take on the beloved idols of pop, and for its contributions to the genre of memoir, Mean is a must-read... Gurba's voice is strong, irreverent, vulnerable, and smart all at the same time, a much needed perspective at a time when white gentility dominates the national conversation on seuxal harassment and what it means to be accountable. --Mask Magazine Gurba's prose is dark and sparse, potent yet playful. She combines different registers and rhythms, and weaves together threads of different kinds of privilege, whiteness, sexual assault, and trauma. --The Rumpus Through wit and in-your-face brilliance, Gurba tells a story that is both deeply personal and bitingly critical of modern life. Along the way, she also gives us a masterclass in what intersectionality is all about. --Shondaland This book is testament, translation, smackdown, and also it's hella funny. --Vol. 1 Brooklyn Mean is a memoir, but it's a unique one: it's poetic, forceful, angry, and, yes, a little bit mean, in the best way possible...one of the most moving and inventive memoirs I've read in a long time. --Book Riot [Mean] charts [Gurba's] coming-of-age as a mixed-raced, queer Chicana and delves into the dark recesses of feminism, racism, sexual violence and PTSD with fierce humor where you'd least expect it. --The Orange County Register Gurba manages to simultaneously inhabit the innocence and audacity of a child's point of view and the nuanced and scathing humor of an adult awareness. She invokes petty meanness and indicts systemic cruelty. She exploits the often-paradoxical distance between the experience of trauma and the body's reactions to create a fractured narrative that teases the line between disclosure and revelation. --Truthout [Gurba] has written a memoir that is just a little bit different--or maybe a lot--an in-your-face account of the young life of a mixed-race Chicana who identifies as queer, who has known prejudice, the anguish of her own sexual assault and an unshakable haunting by others she knows have been victims. --Kansas City Star If you like memoirs (hell, even if you don't), this one will knock your socks off. --Hello Giggles [Mean] is not a triumphant story of survival, rather it's a defiant, hybrid text that refuses to let anyone off the hook and resists the falsity of closure. --Iowa Review Gurba's memoir is a deft fusion of true crime, ghost story and memoir... Gurba freely admits to having a gleefully gruesome sense of humor. She uses this quality liberally in her story of the ghost who haunts Gurba as she's trying to make sense of her own trauma and life as a mixed-race queer Chicana. --Kansas City Star Gurba's writing feels devastating and holy and hilarious all at once. --Autostraddle The complexity of [Gurba's] voice contributes to the appeal of her memoir, which is compelling, suspenseful, both knowable as the girl next door and mysterious...This memoir is remarkable for its unflinching candor, for its humor in the face of tragedy and absurdity, and for its adventurous style. --Shelf Awareness Pro Gurba has a special skill for capturing the sly friendships of young children, and the way so much adolescent intimacy derives from a shared conspiracy. --Bookforum Mean... takes on the 'what are you' question and applies it to every aspect of life. --Electric Literature Mean turns a bright spotlight on the sexual violence that women endure and what it means to live life after trauma. --Them Gurba bookends this book with two sexual assaults and in their retelling manages to offer something close to the catharsis we all so desperately need. When I finished the last page, I couldn't help but reverently whisper aloud, 'Damn.' --Heauxs Mean tackles the most serious of topics--sexual assault, racism, homophobia--with a voice that revels in the grim humor of survival. --Catapult Community, Staff Picks I am such a gigantic fan of Myriam Gurba. Her voice is an alchemy of queer magic, feminist wildness, and intersectional explosion. She's a gigantic inspiration to my work and the sexiest, smartest literary discovery in Los Angeles. She's totally ready to wake up the world. --Jill Soloway Casually frank and grimly funny, the stealth power of this book mesmerizes. Mean excavates one female's personal history with America's rape culture, zooming through suburbia, race, friendship, desire, education, family, pop culture--essentially taking on the world--with prose both controlled and popping with singular detail. There is no writer like Myriam Gurba, and Mean is perfection. --Michelle Tea 'The post-traumatic mind has an advanced set of art skills, ' Myriam Gurba writes. Mean tackles the profane and the sacred by sticking one hand into your chest and grabbing hold of your heart muscle while the other hand tickle fights your brain, complete with serious noogies. Aligned with female saints and feminist artists and writers, Gurba vividly offers stories both familiar and unfamiliar in a heartbreaking and riotously funny collection that, like Gurba, is hybrid in its form. I don't know that I've ever read a book that covers the territories of class, racism, sexual assault, eating disorders, and more that made me LOL with its ferocious intellect and biting humor. There is just no other voice like hers, and Mean is a testament to that fact. I want Myriam Gurba to translate the world. --Wendy Ortiz