wow wow wow. what a funny and sad and dark and abrasive and honest and strong book. absolutely beautiful. Miriam Gurba's word are still stuck to me. i'll be thinking of this book for a long time. just so good. Gurba's writing and narration style makes the entire book fun to read, even the ugly parts ( )

Myriam Gurba has a fierce and unique voice. Worth checking out. ( )

I mostly like how this memoir is written. I like Gurba's anger and her self-conscious edginess, even as it seems sometimes a little melodramatic. I guess that's a common side effect when someone writes about themselves, dramatizes their life through memoir. But I enjoyed it. ( )

I read this for the CA book club (Alta magazine), and I admit I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. I have read some of Gurba's articles, tweets, and the SCATHING review of American Dirt. She always came across as having a huge chip on her shoulder. So I was curious how she would write when choosing her own topics and having time to edit, etc. The chip is smaller, and she clearly has a dry and sarcastic sense of humor--as do I--and her humor is very apparent. So many of her topics are very serious, but the humor she shows and in the "meanness" she uses to survive, shows a lot of self-reflection and kindness.

In this book, a memoir written in short essay-chapters, she discusses her childhood in Santa Maria as a "Molack"--her term for her 3/4 Mexican 1/4 Polish self. Racial divides at school, her sister's anorexia, her own reading. She discusses sexual assault and the police, and her own refusing to testify for fear of seeing the perpetrator. She goes off to Cal--4 years after I left--and I loved this section discussing the dorms, classes, buildings, everything. I really enjoyed her essay format, because the book does not flow over 20 years, it is snapshots that weave in and out.

My only complaint? She is obsessed with white people being blonde and the pop culture "blondes have more fun" "gentlemen prefer blondes" etc etc. Spoiler alert--you can be white and have dark brown hair since birth. And you get all the same *#@! about not being blonde. (My personal favorite: "Dye your hair the shade of blonde you were as a kid!" Um, impossible.) ( )

Assault Exorcism Memoir
Review of the Audible Audio edition (2017), released one-week in advance of the Coffee House Press paperback "Mean" (2017)
Note: Very graphic descriptions of sexual assault are contained in this book.

Mean is both a memoir and an exorcism of writer Myriam Gurba's sexual molestation and assault experiences. It is haunted by the figure of Sophia Castro Torres who was beaten to death after being assaulted by Tommy Jesse Martinez Jr.* in November 1996. Gurba is one of several women who are survivors of assaults by Martinez.

The book otherwise charts the life of Gurba from childhood to present day with often humorous observations of her growing up in a mixed racial family in California. Gurba narrates the book herself and does so in a very precise diction which often evokes the idea of a child reading aloud. This element adds an extra layer of horror and disturbance when the subject matter turns to matters such as early childhood sexual molestation by classmates.

This was by no means an easy book to deal with but its feeling of exorcism of past ghosts and experiences is still exhilarating and its often dark-humoured observations do help to ease the journey.

Trivia and Links
I read Mean as part of my further investigation into the authors identified by the
#dignidadliteraria and #ownvoices hashtags after the controversy surrounding the release of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (Jan. 2020). Myriam Gurba appears to have been the initial catalyst for the negative feedback to Cummins book, with her Dec. 2019 take-down review Pendeja, You Ain't Steinbeck. The review was originally written for Ms. Magazine who ended up offering a kill-fee rather than print the review, as Gurba "lacked the fame to pen something so negative.”

* Martinez has been on California's death row since 1998 after his murder conviction. His sentence is currently on hold due to Governor Gavin Newsom's death penalty moratorium, along with those of 736 other California inmates {Source: Wikipedia}. ( )