Throughout, Gurba writes in short, staccato sentences that detonate musically. The book unfolds in many short chapters, which ripple out from evocative titles like “Wisdom,” “The Unbearable Whiteness of Certain Girls,” and “Aesthetic Boners.” Some chapters move like miniature stories, others like vignettes, others still with the yoked repetitive rhythms of a Sylvia Plath poem or a Sonia Sanchez piece. “He looked ready to dig or raid a tomb,” Gurba writes about one of her Berkeley professors.Īs a made object, Mean is a gorgeous thing. This little book is also stippled with puns (has a writer ever enjoyed saying “cum laude” so much?), fart jokes, brilliant riffs on Japanese poetry, California lingo, and some of the best descriptions you will find of history and anthropology professors.
It also demonstrates how powerfully humor can deflect the clutches of preconceived emotions.Īs soon as you know this is a memoir about rape and survival-which becomes clear on page one-a host of tones and expectations begin to boot up. Ribald, beautiful, broken into shards in some moments, as lucid as a California sky in others, the book is a clinic in the ways complexity asserts itself in variety and under the pressure of trauma. It is to the memoir what Paris Is Burning was to the drag show. In her powerful and hilarious memoir, Mean, Myriam Gurba gives us an electrifying, front-row seat to the high stakes of forging a style. In a world where so many bodies are at risk, one does not have to think hard to ponder the importance of this task. At the highest realm of art, where the act of storytelling is essential to survival, these are not alsos: they are the reordering, the choosing of a written body. The words she chooses, the rhythms she arranges, what music her prose makes. A great writer doesn’t have a style: she is her style.
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