A review by abbie_
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

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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