A review by lizzietherebel
Kink by Garth Greenwell, R.O. Kwon

4.0

Because this is a collection, I have to rate it as a whole- overall, I throughly enjoyed it and many of the included pieces were brilliant and moving. The pieces by Melissa Febos, Roxane Gay, Zeyn Joukhadar, Vanessa Clark, and Brandon Taylor were amongst my favorites. This book is raw, unsurprisingly intimate- but in ways that may be surprising- and often profound. It speaks to the experience of being other, of being marginalized, of being queer and trans and the horrors and beauties that accompany it, and of the ways that kink can destroy us as well as make us whole. Not every story is “kinky” in the way you might expect; in fact, most are not. This is not a book of erotica, but a book of life and sex and the ways that sex changes us and defines us- and also does not define us.  I did not love every story, and of course, the longest stories ended up being the ones that I found mostly a waste of my time. I did not particularly enjoy the pieces by Garth Greenwell or Carmen Maria Machado and found portions of them unnecessary and under-edited. That being said, I can understand their inclusion and enjoyment is not the sole purpose or even necessarily a purpose of reading these stories.  I still found a worthwhile takeaway from these pieces though they were not my favorite. The piece I had a real issue with was Chris Kraus’, and I find it incredibly baffling that the editors chose to close the collection with this. Kraus’ writing is pretentious and uncomfortable; I had to force myself to finish her story and I truly wonder that it was included among the rest of these brilliant artists. Perhaps that’s why it was at the end, because if it had been at the beginning or even towards the middle, I might have stopped reading altogether, or at least stopped for a while. I cannot stand the way Kraus talks about queer people and “hets,” especially being of the latter category herself as far as I can tell (including using the words dyke and fag, which would be fine if she was queer but she’s not so it’s fucking weird and icky. Especially because the queer authors barely use those words in their own pieces.) A lot of the writing and terminology feels weirdly self-conscious, self-indulgent, grossly privileged, and outdated. She includes an afterword (the only author who does this) and mentions she wrote the piece 20 years ago- we can tell, and in a bad way. She switches between  voices, presumably writing about herself both in first and third person, and then interspersing frequent random and unbearable word vomit about art and philosophy. The afterword was actually the only part of her story I enjoyed or connected to. I really wish this piece hadn’t been included and hadn’t been the conclusion of such an excellent collection because it left a bad taste in my mouth after I voraciously inhaled the rest of this book. Of course, you can always choose to skip it if you pick this up, which is part of the beauty of a short story collection, and which I would highly recommend that you do. Without this piece, Kink would have been a much stronger and near-perfect and representative collection.