Her voice is an alchemy of queer magic feminist wildness, and intersectional explosion. “I am such a gigantic fan of Myriam Gurba. I want Myriam Gurba to translate the world.” - Wendy C. There is just no other voice like hers and Mean is a testament to that fact.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that covers the territories of class, racism, sexual assault, eating disorders, and more that made me LOL with its ferocious intellect AND biting humor.
Aligned with female saints, feminist artists and writers, Gurba vividly offers stories both familiar and unfamiliar in a heartbreaking and riotously funny collection that, like, Gurba, is hybrid in its form. Mean tackles the profane and the sacred by sticking one hand into your chest and grabbing hold of your heart muscle while the other hand tickle fights your brain complete with serious noogies. “‘The post-traumatic mind has an advanced set of art skills,’ Myriam Gurba writes. This book pulses with life and wit, yet takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously. Melding formal fluidity and vivid, caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. I wished Gurba had wrestled with, as Nelson does, what it means to use a dead woman, a stranger, in this way: as a blank slate on which to project her fantasies and fears.An intoxicating blend of true crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. The book’s clear forebear is The Red Parts, Maggie Nelson’s book about the murder of her Aunt Jane. It feels as if Gurba is drawn to these details not from ghoulishness but from a need to make her own suffering and fear feel more real to her. Gurba is addicted to terrible puns, and they get worse and more numerous as the book goes on.Worse, the compulsive punning and jokiness distract from the book’s more ambitious possibilities - and its most interesting tension. The book keeps revolving between these poles of horror and humor, sometimes wobbling on its axis. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. Mean calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish - and I say this admiringly. Myriam Gurba is a self-professed 'final girl' and Mean is her testimony: a scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.
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