By Vanessa Angelica Villareal
Tiny Reparations Books, 2024. 370 pages. Nonfiction.
In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. Each chapter is an attempt to reimagine and re-world what has been lost. In one essay, Vanessa examines the gender performativity of Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can provide healing when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember--her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce--and finds a new way to archive her history and map her future(s), one infused with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking. By engaging readers in her project of rebuilding narrative, Vanessa broadens our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be. Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories.
I loved this collection of essays! As a huge fan of fantasy, I loved seeing how she connected fictional narratives to her real-life experiences and explored how metaphorically they are similar. One of the amazing things about fiction and fantasy is how people across cultures and backgrounds can find deep connections in the same story. Vanessa is candid about her experiences and her history, it truly feels like as much of a memoir as it is an essay collection on media analysis.
If you like Magical/Realism, you might also like:
By Aisha Harris
Harper Collins, 2023. 280 pages. Memoir.
In nine lively essays, critic Aisha Harris invites us into the wonderful, maddening process of making sense of the pop culture we consume. Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape them right back. In the opening essay, an interaction with Chance the Rapper prompts an investigation into the origin myth of her name. Elsewhere, Aisha traces the evolution of the "Black Friend" trope from its Twainian origins through to the heyday of the Spice Girls, teen comedies like Clueless, and sitcoms of the New Girl variety. And she examines the overlap of taste and identity in this era, rejecting the patriarchal ethos that you are what you like. Whatever the subject, sitting down with her book feels like hanging out with your smart, hilarious, pop culture-obsessed friend--and it's a delight.
By Amanda Montell
Atria Books, 2024. 257 pages. Nonfiction
'Magical thinking' can be broadly defined as the belief that one's internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world: Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain's coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven. Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the 'Halo effect' cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger than life celebrities, to how the 'Sunk cost fallacy' can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we've realized they're not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell's prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.
LA
No comments:
Post a Comment