My rating is more positive than negative because these essays definitely got me thinking, showing me a different lens through which to view the world, didn’t shy away from harsh truths, and had some fantastically quotable lines.

Yet with all due respect to Lorde’s activist impact, emotional labor, and poetic prowess, this book just wasn’t a great match for me as a bisexual Asian-American woman — i.e., not Black or Caucasian, not a lesbian or straight — and in some essays I felt my own experiences/identity portrayed as Other or completely excluded from the picture. (To give credit where it’s due, though, Lorde acknowledges her own potential culpability and ignorance with regards to identities she doesn’t share. There are clear efforts to be inclusive and intersectional, which were most likely revolutionary at the time of writing.)

Related: I couldn’t quite connect with the writing because it seemed to deal mostly in binaries (equitable/oppressive, Black/white, gay/straight, empathy/hate, etc) and abstract concepts. While of course the problem must be stated before it can be addressed, Lorde seems to spend more time on what isn’t working or won’t work rather than possible next steps — which is important to the conversation, and which many people still need to hear, but which is very emotionally taxing and even demoralizing to read through. (Not to say that Lorde, or QPoC, have the responsibility to solve racism or sexism or homophobia or any social issue!)

There were also passages I just didn’t understand because a list of anecdotes about discrimination would be followed by a metaphor about trees then jump immediately back to a discussion of privilege. I’m sure there was a cohesive point; I just had difficulty identifying it.

So to summarize, in many ways this book wasn’t for me (or people like me) but wasn’t intended to be, and that made it a worthwhile but frustrating read.