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116 reviews for:
Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
4.24 AVERAGE
116 reviews for:
Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
4.24 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
TW: incest, SA, IPV
"I'll tell you a secret. Sometimes I stop and close my eyes and send all these pictures of my life back to the kid I was, who is still back there, trying to survive. Prayer is activism. I tell her: this is waiting, waiting. It doesn't get better (but it did), it just changes. I pray it to her, promise her, say, 'Stay alive. This is what's waiting for you. You will make it come to be.'"
This is such an important book, especially for brown gay working class youth, especially when they're abuse survivors.
I don't really have the words to talk about this book, except how every word felt like my heart was being torn open and then put back together again. Just do yourselves a favour and go read it.
This is such an important book, especially for brown gay working class youth, especially when they're abuse survivors.
I don't really have the words to talk about this book, except how every word felt like my heart was being torn open and then put back together again. Just do yourselves a favour and go read it.
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
fast-paced
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Alcoholism, Cancer, Child abuse, Chronic illness, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Incest, Mental illness, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Police brutality, Grief, Medical trauma, Sexual harassment, Deportation
This was a quick read. She writes really well and about places that are familiar in New York and Toronto. It's also about surviving trauma and activism Probably one of the best memoirs I've read. And Ive read a lot of memoirs!
this is an important book. this is a book in a long lineage of femme writers, and a long lineage of healers and survivors. these are the kinds of stories we need to exist, to be told, to be retold, to be shared, and to be preserved and passed down. femme and survival are both lineages; we need the stories of elders to show us possible shapes for our futures. and we need love stories that are this kind of complicated, the kind of complicated that is twisted up with big power and longtime patterns and abuse and cycles, above all. here we learn what we might be, both what we can dare to desire, and what we might become without liberation, without care, without resilience. dirty river is a book for which i am deeply grateful: for inspiration, for teaching, and for modeling the deep femmedom of extreme vulnerability and honesty.
Like other reviewers, I felt the book was a little uneven (though I was totally comfortable with the story telling style.) It really picks up in the last third. (That section is 4 star.)
Through no fault of the book... I picked it up because of a reading challenge to read a book by or about someone with a disability. I was hoping the memoir was going to touch on more of her disability than it actually did.
Through no fault of the book... I picked it up because of a reading challenge to read a book by or about someone with a disability. I was hoping the memoir was going to touch on more of her disability than it actually did.