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A review by lichenbitten
Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women by Marcia Aldrich
4.0
Note: I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley.
With the rise of the internet and the subsequent explosion of online publications, the essay has gained newfound importance in the literary landscape. On a daily basis--more than books or short stories or poems--I read essays. Those essays tend to be about pop culture, films, books, and everything in between. So I was intrigued when I came across Waveform. I thought it would be something that I’d like, and I was definitely right.
Waveform collects trenchant essays written by women in the nearly two decades that have passed in this century. No book can be all-encompassing. No book can capture every experience of the age we are living through. What Waveform does well is offer diversity and a good mix of the famous and the obscure. There are the major names--Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Margo Jefferson. And there are the names that I, at least, was not familiar with. So Waveform gives us essays we may have already read and also gives us a chance to discover other voices that write about gender, race, and class.
I started reading Waveform after the 2016 election. In my heartbreak, I felt myself in need of feminist company because, for me, feminism has always been salvation. It gives us tools to analyze the world in which we live and it also gives us the ability to envision how else the world could be. Feminism tells the untold stories, it offers alternative narratives. In dark times, we need to think critically. We need writing that is honest and complex, writing that humanizes and scrutinizes. The essays in Waveform are written from a personal point of view but they also, for the most part, engage with larger political issues and realities, like Neela Vaswani’s “Dumb Show,” and Laurie Lynn Drummond’s “The Girl, the Cop, and I,” which both confront rape culture and the trauma of rape. Or Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s stunning “They Didn’t Come Here Cowboys,” which illuminates the injustice and degradation of mass incarceration through the story of the rodeo held at Angola prison in Louisiana where prisoners are forced to perform for spectators. Or Torrey Peters’s heart-wrenching memorial to trans people killed around the world in “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay.” Peters created the essay from a document that listed all the deaths of transgender people from 2013 to 2014. All of these essays continue to haunt me. I keep thinking about them and I suspect they will always stay with me.
While I did find myself skipping some of the essays in this collection because they either didn’t grab my attention or didn’t seem to be going anywhere, that was the exception not the rule. For the most part, I found essays that spoke to me, that moved me, that made me think, that made me highlight passages. And it’s probably true that some of the essays I skipped might speak to someone else. Furthermore, not every essay is serious. Some were clever and interesting, like Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You,” which is written as a series of rejection letters from the author to herself, or Kyoko Mori’s “Cat Stories,” which is about Mori’s relationship with cats throughout her life; it’s about how cats helped her and saved her (something I can definitely relate to!).
I found what I was looking for when I chose to read Waveform. I found a collection of essays that spoke to me, that centered voices that have something profound to say about the time in which we live, that offered comfort, knowledge, warmth, rawness, and honesty. In the years to come, I will return to many of the essays I discovered in this collection.
With the rise of the internet and the subsequent explosion of online publications, the essay has gained newfound importance in the literary landscape. On a daily basis--more than books or short stories or poems--I read essays. Those essays tend to be about pop culture, films, books, and everything in between. So I was intrigued when I came across Waveform. I thought it would be something that I’d like, and I was definitely right.
Waveform collects trenchant essays written by women in the nearly two decades that have passed in this century. No book can be all-encompassing. No book can capture every experience of the age we are living through. What Waveform does well is offer diversity and a good mix of the famous and the obscure. There are the major names--Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Margo Jefferson. And there are the names that I, at least, was not familiar with. So Waveform gives us essays we may have already read and also gives us a chance to discover other voices that write about gender, race, and class.
I started reading Waveform after the 2016 election. In my heartbreak, I felt myself in need of feminist company because, for me, feminism has always been salvation. It gives us tools to analyze the world in which we live and it also gives us the ability to envision how else the world could be. Feminism tells the untold stories, it offers alternative narratives. In dark times, we need to think critically. We need writing that is honest and complex, writing that humanizes and scrutinizes. The essays in Waveform are written from a personal point of view but they also, for the most part, engage with larger political issues and realities, like Neela Vaswani’s “Dumb Show,” and Laurie Lynn Drummond’s “The Girl, the Cop, and I,” which both confront rape culture and the trauma of rape. Or Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s stunning “They Didn’t Come Here Cowboys,” which illuminates the injustice and degradation of mass incarceration through the story of the rodeo held at Angola prison in Louisiana where prisoners are forced to perform for spectators. Or Torrey Peters’s heart-wrenching memorial to trans people killed around the world in “Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay.” Peters created the essay from a document that listed all the deaths of transgender people from 2013 to 2014. All of these essays continue to haunt me. I keep thinking about them and I suspect they will always stay with me.
While I did find myself skipping some of the essays in this collection because they either didn’t grab my attention or didn’t seem to be going anywhere, that was the exception not the rule. For the most part, I found essays that spoke to me, that moved me, that made me think, that made me highlight passages. And it’s probably true that some of the essays I skipped might speak to someone else. Furthermore, not every essay is serious. Some were clever and interesting, like Brenda Miller’s “We Regret to Inform You,” which is written as a series of rejection letters from the author to herself, or Kyoko Mori’s “Cat Stories,” which is about Mori’s relationship with cats throughout her life; it’s about how cats helped her and saved her (something I can definitely relate to!).
I found what I was looking for when I chose to read Waveform. I found a collection of essays that spoke to me, that centered voices that have something profound to say about the time in which we live, that offered comfort, knowledge, warmth, rawness, and honesty. In the years to come, I will return to many of the essays I discovered in this collection.