Living in a town in Ohio in which Chihaya was outside the two predominant racial groups white and Black , life beyond the walls of her home was hardly a balm. She attempts suicide three times, but her parents do nothing about it. As an adult, Chihaya has hit the marks so many aim for: a PhD, a tenure-track position at Princeton.
So she finds herself before the terrifying chasm of writing her tenure bookβa dread-inducing experience for anyone. Yet for Chihaya, who has come to largely lean on self-harm as a coping mechanism, it is like jumping out of a plane and trying to knit the parachute on the way down. She ends up in the hospital. Throughout the memoir, while making plain how debilitating her condition is as it zaps her capacity to read, Chihaya catalogs, chapter by chapter, the different books in her life prior to this moment that were instrumental in her self-realization and deep love of literature.
Her friend Merve Emre gamely hosts Chihaya at Oxford to help shepherd her into recovery. For me, was defined by illness and physical limitation, so I ended up doing a lot of comfort reading and rereading. Hammad was a guest on this column when Recognizing the Stranger came out. Here is a bit of what I included in that post.
The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand? In her extended afterword, penned in January of this year, Hammad reflects on the words we have just read. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing. Roland Barthes, Michelet. I love digging into old reviews, and this one is from the LA Times in Although each section is followed by relevant excerpts from Michelet, it is not so much his voice the reader hears as it is Barthes.
Katie Kitamura, Audition. Though the young man is a stranger, he informs the protagonist that she is, in fact, his mother. In a profile in Elle , Lauren Puckett-Pope writes,. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Humboldt embarked on various explorations of the New World of South America, climbing the highest peaks, crossing the deepest rivers and traversing the densest jungles in the most challenging tropical conditions.
