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booksnailmail's review
challenging
dark
medium-paced
3.5
CW: rape, violent assault, homophobia
“We may feel that because we are privy to the wreckage she belongs to us too, but she does not.”
I was lucky to read this book with a book club that can dissect a mashed potato of the beautiful and the problematic - in reading this, I had moments of feeling so seen I wanted to hug the author and cry. Yet, the authentic recapitulation of personal trauma felt incomplete and overshadowed by the exploitation of another’s.
Mean is a creative memoir about Gurba’s sexual assault - she was just walking through the park. The man who raped her was eventually caught for raping and murdering several women before Gurba. The writing of this novel is fierce - it breaks language and mosaics it back together to bring new vocabularies to rape culture - for example, after we are raped we look at the world through “rape-tinted glasses” and how after violent assault, we are “mostly” not dead. This writing makes rape mundane, classic, expected - and why not? Even when we have a rape event in our lives, we grow up breathing it. I was assaulted every year of college - and this book helped me recognize harbingers of this trauma in my childhood and teenagerhood. We are groomed from youth, and this memoir tilted my lens to recognize this.
However, as @librosytierra put so aptly, this book punches down rather than up. To me, this means romanticizing a monolith of identity to be able to make in-group jokes. Yet this doesn’t hold - being queer doesn’t excuse AIDS jokes, being third gen polish doesn’t excuse Holocaust jokes, and being chicanx doesn’t abscond you of light skin or white privilege. Just because a woman was raped by the same man as you doesn’t put you in some sort of rape lineage. How can you smash open her groin on your pages, when you hold your own trauma in a shell?
Overall, I find this hard to recommend but also hard to not recommend. Approach with caution. Gurba will bite.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape
Moderate: Homophobia and Antisemitism
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