atsundarsingh's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
*Thanks to Netgalley and Peepal Tree Press for the ARC*
Let me say first that I found writing itself enjoyable, and I always felt I was in the flow while I was actually reading. For me the problem is that upon reflection, this book doesn't hold up to what it promised.
It's not the stylistic choices that are the problem; memoir doesn't need to by linear, and memoir can be anchored to a single relationship (in this case the author to her grandmother, Burrimummy) while being about a number of other things. The issue is that this is a memoir of more description than observation. The author gives tons of detail about her life, and I found the vulnerability rewarding as a reader, and impressive as someone thinking about what the emotional cost of it must have been. But it is a lot of description without much reflection on what it all was. There isn't a narrative throughline or an insight that readers are supposed to follow or interrogate here - or if there is, it wasn't apparent to me. Unfortunately that makes it sound a lot like a catalogue of blended privilege and pain which is, if we're being honest, a reasonable description of a lot of people's lives (even if we aren't all related to royalty). The question in memoir is why this curated story of a life (and our stories are always curated, mediated) should be something that helps readers think/learn/feel/be differently. This book doesn't give us an answer to that.
Missing are the reflections on the things the author reflected on to get to the point where she could put this in publishable form. Her husband's family are descendants of indenture and she acknowledges shame that her grandmother looks down on them, but never examines her own complicity or talks about how she thinks of their social differences. When she engages class, it's to reflect on what others thought of it, not herself. She is a journalist in a period of high violence, especially gender-based violence in Trinidad, but she doesn't say anything about the abusive dynamics in her family except that they are inherited and continued. Colourism and racism deeply affected her life, but she is rarely or never the one commenting on it.
For me, this is a book that had so much potential to vault to the top of my list and then landed far short of expectations.
Let me say first that I found writing itself enjoyable, and I always felt I was in the flow while I was actually reading. For me the problem is that upon reflection, this book doesn't hold up to what it promised.
It's not the stylistic choices that are the problem; memoir doesn't need to by linear, and memoir can be anchored to a single relationship (in this case the author to her grandmother, Burrimummy) while being about a number of other things. The issue is that this is a memoir of more description than observation. The author gives tons of detail about her life, and I found the vulnerability rewarding as a reader, and impressive as someone thinking about what the emotional cost of it must have been. But it is a lot of description without much reflection on what it all was. There isn't a narrative throughline or an insight that readers are supposed to follow or interrogate here - or if there is, it wasn't apparent to me. Unfortunately that makes it sound a lot like a catalogue of blended privilege and pain which is, if we're being honest, a reasonable description of a lot of people's lives (even if we aren't all related to royalty). The question in memoir is why this curated story of a life (and our stories are always curated, mediated) should be something that helps readers think/learn/feel/be differently. This book doesn't give us an answer to that.
Missing are the reflections on the things the author reflected on to get to the point where she could put this in publishable form. Her husband's family are descendants of indenture and she acknowledges shame that her grandmother looks down on them, but never examines her own complicity or talks about how she thinks of their social differences. When she engages class, it's to reflect on what others thought of it, not herself. She is a journalist in a period of high violence, especially gender-based violence in Trinidad, but she doesn't say anything about the abusive dynamics in her family except that they are inherited and continued. Colourism and racism deeply affected her life, but she is rarely or never the one commenting on it.
For me, this is a book that had so much potential to vault to the top of my list and then landed far short of expectations.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Abandonment, Classism, and Domestic abuse
Moderate: Excrement, Sexism, Terminal illness, Violence, Religious bigotry, Vomit, Islamophobia, Racism, Toxic relationship, Forced institutionalization, Grief, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, and Medical content
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