Reviews with content warning for Rape - A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

Reviews tagging 'Rape'

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

21 reviews

chelsl's review against another edition

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emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0

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ivi_reads_books's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

This book is a good mix of memoir and history and stats on indigenous people in Canada and the US. The author describes growing up with a bipolar mother in precarious environments and how their suroundings influenced their behavior.
The author doesn't tell the reader what to do or think. She rather observes what happens and what doesn't happen. What gets said and what doesn't and thus encourages readers to self-reflect on their own behavior

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lattelibrarian's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

Alicia Elliott is an incredibly talented writer. I read her debut novel first, then this when our library purchased it. Each essay is masterful--especially that in which she weaves Susan Sontag's thoughts on photography with her own experience being photographed without consent by her friends through the lens of voyeuristic and racialized photography. She also has an interactive essay at the very end which blurs the line between abuser and victim as she discusses intergenerational trauma, family histories, and poverty.

Perhaps the most compelling essay for me is the one about lice where Elliott states that her family's crime was not neglect, but being impoverished. They had love and discipline and food. They just didn't have the money to treat the lice that ravaged her and her siblings for years on end.

Elliott also goes into detail about her depression, her mother's bipolar disorder, and her father's forceful institutionalization of her mother. I can only imagine what this must have felt like to finally publish, to "air out" all the family secrets, so to speak. She's brave, but she's also simply telling the truth. I really respect her for that.

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abbie_'s review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

4.25

Had this one on my radar for a couple of years now, finally got around to it and regret putting it off for so long! Elliott has so much to say about living with family with mental health issues, dealing with your own mental health issues, abuse and trauma, colonialism in the past and its ongoing effects today. She toes that line between the personal and political essay/memoir collection perfectly!

I wrote scattered thoughts about the essays that resonated with me the most, so here they are except I didn’t note down the essay titles 😅

Loved the essay about diversity being a white word and the new buzzword in publishing. White authors feel threatened by BIPOC authors seemingly monopolising all the publishing deals (lol sure) so they do their best to shoehorn characters of colour into their work - as long as they’re writing with empathy, so the saying goes, no harm done. But Elliott argues that unless you’re writing about a particular community with love, it’ll be glaringly obvious and damaging to said community. White authors like Lionel Shriver immediately go onto the defensive, claiming censorship, criticism turned into censoring free speech.

There’s a hard-hitting essay about Elliott’s sexual assault. During sexual violence trials, it’s the woman’s innocence that’s put on trial, not the man’s guilt. Before choosing to believe a man is *not* a rapist, people do not subject him to the barrage of questions we demand of women to prove they *are* a victim. We demand a woman put her trauma and pain on display, to watch as we pull it apart, put fingers into open wounds, make her perform her trauma again and again before, more often than not, still choosing not to believe.

The essay about food deserts in North America was amazing, the way the US and Canada have manufactured them, enabled poorer people to become overweight and then ill. Why do people believe that the answer to what is choking us - capitalism and colonialism - is to shove more of those same things down our throats while we choke?

Essay on photography, voyeurism, colonialism, consent, power, desire - not as strong as some of the others but I liked how she explored white photographers encroaching on communities they don’t belong to to further their and western white society’s stereotypical views of a community

Essay on lies and fiction (made me think of something else I read recently) where women writers are often conflated with their characters. Men rarely receive this treatment, but people often treat fiction written by women as autofiction

Would highly recommend this collection!

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paperbackportals's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

A moving series of narrative and informative essays that explore not only Elliott’s life but the effects of racism and colonialism.

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jcstokes95's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

A difficult read throughout, there wasn’t a single essay that didn’t leave me chewing on it after. I think all essay collections are hoping to be called “thought-provoking” and this one earns that description in spades. While I found myself resistant to some of Elliot’s arguments and do believe there are a few structural issues with how she builds her essays, I am still turning over everything I’ve learned in these pieces.

Elliot is at her best when melding her own stories throughout an essay; she invites us into her own hardest moments to see how the systemic affected her family before zooming out. A particular standout to me was “On Forbidden Rooms and Intentional Forgetting” which investigates how we demand survivors of violence perform their pain for us to take them seriously. This is perfectly crafted, taking her own story (or the pieces she feels she can share) before weaving in examples from history and current events to put the reader in an uncomfortable position…one where they must consider how much they dig into others darkest moments before we give them compassion. I think the brilliance of this piece speaks to how well these essays can work when they are tightly wound.

I struggled with some of the longer pieces; I often found myself disagreeing with Elliot…or, if not disagreeing, questioning how she had gotten to her conclusion. A lot of the time it feels like she speak from what she “feels” to be true, rather than backing her thought process up. She rarely gives space to opinions that do not match her own, which is frustrating, because as the reader I am asking questions that she doesn’t beat back on. I am okay finding myself not agreeing with an author, but am more frustrated to not see her seriously outline critique. For example, in the piece responding to Sontag (which was my least favorite) she states that “maybe there is no ethical way to ethically photograph pain”. She gives little time to discussing how impartial photojournalism has turned the world toward empathy at important moments. I would venture she may disagree with that idea, but I’d at least like her to contend with it in this piece. This sort of blind eye gets turned in a few of her essays; I would be curious to see if her approach changes in a second book.

All in all, I recommend this collection if you like to feel challenged and don’t mind feeling like you want to argue out the small stuff with the author. I would say that a good essay collection should make you question the author, even if you are standing on the same side of the fence with them.

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