Maybe I am not the right audience for this book or maybe reading it instead of listening to it would have been better, but I just didn't get why this memoir got as much acclaim as it has.

The author grew up in Toronto in a Pakistani family but her father is Jamaican so she looks more black than Asian. She decided to go away to university partly because she was involved in an abusive relationship and she wanted to get away from him. Her choice of university was the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. She found very few people of colour there and she felt quite isolated. She did seem to find ample opportunity to party which she readily discloses. On the other hand there isn't much information about her studies. I'm not even clear on what her field of study was. I am sorry that Ms. Martis was subject to racism and sexism and I can see that instead of being fun her university years were traumatic. I just felt that she may have had the wrong idea about post-secondary education going into it. And maybe she didn't make the wisest choices once she was there. ( )

The author grew up in the diverse Canadian city of Toronto, but decided to move to the smaller city of London, Ontario for university. Unfortunately, London was not so diverse. As a woman of “mixed” race – her mother was Pakistani and her father (whom she did not have a relationship with) from the Caribbean – she stuck out and had a hard time at her new school. University was supposed to be fun – full of friends and parties. Though she did go to London with a friend, they grew apart during their time there. And Eternity had a number of toxic relationships, and was treated to many microaggressions and abuses.

As someone who went to university about 30 years ago, and even then, wasn’t “into” partying or drinking, I enjoyed her chapters about her family and relationships more than the partying/drinking/campus/student life. The book (though I listened to the audio) read sort of like essays. Obviously as a middle-aged white woman, I am not the target audience! Of course, Eternity brought in some stats to go along with her own experiences. I found the stats easier to swallow, and of course, she went through what she went through, but I questioned some of her generalizations about white people; many of the “stereotypes” or generalizations (about white or black people) she mentioned were things I had never heard of. That’s not to say they aren’t stereotypes, but if they are, I hadn’t heard of (many of) them before.

I feel badly for this kind of review. I hate to criticize, as I know she wrote what she did experience. Am I being a “defensive” white person? I’d like to think not, but I don’t know. The author read the audio herself and did a fine job. ( )

Author Eternity Martis recounts her own experiences as a Black woman in Canadian post-secondary education. Martis uses personal stories in tandem with gender/race-based statistics to address the traumatic and sometimes fatal blend of racism and sexism that Black women experience, also known as "misogynoir".⠀
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Her writing is at times deeply moving, and despite the difficult topics addressed, often very funny. She tackles a wide range of issues (sexual assault, rape culture, tokenism, white supremacy to name a few), but I found that her writing especially shines in the chapters where she digs deeply into her own complicated and traumatic relationships with men, specifically a few boyfriends, and her largely absent father.⠀

Despite the many barriers she's faced, through resilience, family support, and strong relationships with other Black women, Martis has survived - no - thrived, and ultimately shares a beautifully empowering message for other women of colour in post-secondary education.⠀ ( )

this was up and down for me. (well, down, up, down, and then up for me. in the end i probably most liked about 100 pages of it.) the first 40% of so of this didn't seem to add anything new or different to the conversation, and wasn't particularly well (or poorly) written. (although i admit to being completely surprised that anyone could still say something like "i've never talked to a black person before!" even a decade or so ago.) but then, when she got more heated and started talking about oppression more generally, and intersections of oppression, she got more passionate and it improved for me, at least for a while.

it was interesting the way she inserted the section about interpersonal violence. (i haven't decided if it works that she changed the audience of this section to be "you" - the man she tells us about.) but the other thing she does here is revisit some of the stories she told before, but now we see them through the lens of her being in an abusive relationship. the memories she shares now seem different, changed, and i wonder if that's on purpose, because of what it must be like when someone you know tells you what was going on behind the scenes, and you have to reframe your memories of that time, because of what was hidden. i don't know if this was her intention, but it works. (otherwise, revisiting the same time frame in this way is kind of confusing for the reader, in my opinion.)

while this didn't feel even or consistent, it ends powerfully and with some of her strongest writing. (as to strong writing, she used repetition a few times throughout the book really well, which not everyone can do successfully.) and her point - that she reiterates with a quote that is sometimes attributed to zora neale hurston ("If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.") is an important one. does it even matter if she adds something new to the conversation? if the point is - this happened to me. or - this still happens to people. then does it matter at all what i think? if one black person reads this book and can say - i am not alone or i am not the only one or this woman understands me in a way i didn't know was possible, then it's done it's job.

so i didn't love this, but it wasn't for me. (i mean, she puts in a lot of pop culture references and i couldn't relate to any of them. clearly i am not the intended audience.) i'm interested to see what she does next, and will definitely be happy to try her again. ( )