A review by pangnaolin
The Women by Hilton Als

adventurous challenging dark informative reflective tense slow-paced

3.5

In The Women, Als explores the trope of the Negress and amerikkka’s cultural obsession with it, along with his own connection to the identity, in three parts— covering his mother, the famed Dorothy Dean, and his relationship with the Harlem Renaissance poet Owen Dodson.

I honestly have really mixed feelings about this book. Als is brutally honest and explores each topic thoroughly, but at times, I feel like he inserted details about peoples’ cruelty purely for shock value, and I found some of his commentary uninteresting, especially when he spent a lot of the second part speculating on aspects of Dorothy’s life from seemingly nothing.

This might just be a me thing, but I also feel like I had trouble knowing when Als was proclaiming something as a belief he held vs. when he was proclaiming something as a belief a person he was writing about held, which put me off at times and made me wary of his writing, because as much as this book was intricately and wonderfully written, some of the people in it said some pretty abhorrent shit.

Anyway, yeah! It was good and I don’t regret reading it— especially the first part, which I think was much better than any of the rest of it— but I also don’t think I’d particularly recommend it.