A difficult and enlightening memoir. Khakpour writes in loops that made it hard to distinguish one crash from another, but this confusion immersed me in a better understanding of her frustration and agony of being sick and having no cure, no clear cause, and often not even being taken seriously. The gaslighting she received was internalized, and even when she focused on getting better, she questioned if she was practicing self-care or if she was wallowing in depression. Heartbreaking to see how medical ignorance caused so much more pain, so much so that she began to lose her loved one and eventually found almost everyone untrustworthy. 
At the same time, Khakpour seemed to be able to give herself some grace that she was unable to give to her friends. She acknowledges that she abused and was a drug user for a long time, but friends she did drugs with were “junkies” she had no respect for. When she found out another friend was a sex worker, she looked down on her and said their relationship was never the same. 
Khakpour‘s relationship to whiteness was also hard to read. Her terror in moments of heightened xenophobia and Islamophobia were gutting, but at the same time she either missed or didn’t include any moments of solidarity with POC and Muslims in her community. Instead, she gushes about a US-government funded trip to Indonesia (why was the US finding these trips? No reflection on the motives there) and makes sure to mention that she traveled to Israel for a book project (no solidarity with long-running calls for cultural boycotts?) In a taxi with a white driver, she calls her mom but tells the man,  “Just so you know, it’s Farsi. I’m Iranian but not one of the bad people. Please don’t be worried by my language.” As if, were she speaking Arabic, he could have had a legitimate problem, even seeming to suggest that there are Farsi speaking women in New York he should be worried about being near, but she’s one of the good ones. Khakpour acknowledges that she sometimes passed for white, and maybe it was the toll of her incredibly long journey of illness that kept her from interrogating her perspectives on xenophobia, but these stories felt shallow and jarring compared to the depth of her discussions around her sickness. 
Even in those discussions, she sometimes seemed dismissive of other chronic illnesses, particularly ableist in her writings about mental health struggles, and ready to call one alternative health program a cult while completely buying into another. I hope in the time since she wrote this, her perspectives have been widened, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, and her politics seem to have shifted based on her social medial posts alone, so I would be very interested in a second memoir from her, and hopeful that it would contain more solidarity.

Maybe it was because the audiobook reader had a very childish voice, but every time the main characters age came up I was thrown that she was in her late 30s and not late teens. Her general ambivalence and lack of clear purpose also added to this, but maybe if I had read the ebook instead that would have felt more like a consequence of the upheaval she was surviving and less like an adolescent trait. 

The conversations around family and belonging were well done, but either I lost focus near the end, or the themes were not drawn through. 

The horrors of the upheaval were very difficult to hear, and those conversations were gripping.

A difficult book to rate. The setting and mythology were totally immersive, the commentary on colonialism was sharp, and the characters gave me a lot to root for. However, there were at least three points where I thought the book was wrapping up only to find hours more to read. The journey became repetitive, and while I liked Maali’s growth, the constant homophobia and violence behind him became too much to keep wading through. 

While the atmosphere and concept of this novel were incredible, the plot and characters left me wanting so much more. The Memory Police could have been such a powerful call against authoritarianism, book burnings, and the collective amnesia plaguing modern society in service of thoughtless capitalism, but instead this book delivered an interesting but pointless tale of a weird land where things happen with little meaning, no characters grow from it, and people react in strange but un-interrogated ways.

Why have R be married if he is to start a romance with the main character? I didn’t feel any spark between them at first, but by the end I saw what their romance meant. Still, if the wife was so easily forgotten and his NEWBORN BABY almost never mentioned, why create them? I thought something interesting would at least happen with the wife confronting the main character, or the baby turning out to Remember like his father, but no.

The passivity of the main character was the most grating. She lost her family and is in constant fear for the safety of herself and her lover, yet she says, "We've managed to cope with all kinds of disappearances in the past, but no one has suffered terribly, no one even seems to mind much.”

No one has suffered terribly?? They murdered your mother and disappeared your friends, including children!

I suppose her passivity is supposed to mirror that in her final novel, especially the voice being the first/last thing to be taken/disappeared, but that device alone wasn’t enough to make this a great read.

“When my oldest sister had her nose done, I felt like someone had castrated my family. The day I made a commitment to my nose and vowed to keep it — not as a burden, but as an inheritance — was the day I reclaimed control over my image.” 

Thank you to New Vessel Press for sending an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Almost every woman could write a similar story to many of those in Ugliness, especially those who grew up as a minority in a majority of different looking women, but few could write this story with the artistry that Hilal has. Even the shortest chapter and smallest poem brings the cutting pain of feeling Other and the acute worthlessness of ugliness, especially in pre-teen and teenage years. This book brought me flashbacks to conversations with the women in my life - if you start hair removal on that part of your arm you’ll have to go all the way up to there, remove your eyebrow hair here but not there, suck in your stomach, don’t slouch but don’t be haughty, don’t smile so large. 

Some of it feels a little heavy-handed: “The structurally Other cannot employ external simulation to escape entrenched fascist ideology in society. And entrenched fascist ideology is never simply looking to reject the deviant nose as such; it is out to reject the very existence of the human to whom the nose belongs.” However, most of the book hit home and has continued to resonate.

Hilal also introduced me to histories I was unaware of: most memorably the rise of plastic surgery in early 1930s Germany from a Jewish doctor who came to specialize in rhinoplasty for those with “Jewish-looking” noses, as well as the “revolt of the freaks” when the “prodigies” of a 1898 Barnum & Bailey Circus called for a strike until the show stopped calling them “freaks.” She is also flawlessly mixes mediums and topics in this relatively small book: poems, history, photographs, memoir, essays, surreal fiction, and more.

As eugenics and fascism are making a horrific return, this book is is important for calling on everyone to investigate the ways society discriminates against the “ugly” and to look within and stop our own ideas of beauty from defining who we see as having inherent worth. 

Ugliness is available February 11, 2025.

A gripping combination of current events journalism, a history of human migration, a memoir, a travel journal, and so much more. I listened to the audiobook and I’d love to get my hands on a physical copy in the future to further absorb each story. The way Markham laid the completely man-made tragedy and unjust abuse refugees traversing the Mediterranean bare and was able to so clearly parallel the systems the USA has put in place to abuse and disrupt refugees at the USA-Mexico border was infuriating and validating. So often, refugee “crises” are pitted against each other, one “Western” country touts how accepting they are of new arrivals to out-shine the rest while they all collaborate in destabilizing asylum seeker homelands and violate international and local laws to keep other people from finding a safe place. Focusing on a few individual stories really brought each point to heart. 

“A poem is an atom. Better to leave it alone. Who needs more nuclear explosions!”

I think I would have enjoyed this as a teenager  or in a more meditative state, or even maybe more as an audiobook, but as an ebook it somehow felt like a slog through a haphazard stream of consciousness - jumping without grace from the sea to the meaning or God in a modern world to climate change to racism to the weight of female beauty and through all sorts of pop culture references. I still want to read more from Etel Adnan, this just wasn’t the time/place/prose for me.

A touching and difficult memoir about how Jessica Machado grew up largely severed from the culture of her ancestors because of colonialism and family dynamics. 

One of my favorite parts of the memoir was how Machado finds her Hawai’ian traditions as an adult and is able to see some of those practices, like mana wahine/community of powerful women, in her childhood memories, even from other haole/white people and from foreigners/non-locals. “I was less intrigued by the women themselves than I was by their friendships with Shelle. How they all seemed saddled by responsibility yet made room for solace in each other. It wasn't moving mountains or ousting evil men, but it was the mana wahine I didn't know I was searching for.”

However, while she tied the history of  Hawai’i in beautifully throughout her own story, I would have loved to see her reconnect with that history and heal. It was great to end the book with her in a better place in the epilogue, but it felt like quite a jump. I respect wanting to keep her young family private, but I wished there was more on the ways she reconnected with Hawaiian culture and got to that better place. 

I also wish there was more space given to sovereignty. She touched on different Hawaiian movements and protests against different USA military and private land grabs, but it would have been powerful to hear more details or see those movements tied in to other indigenous sovereignty movements. For example, in one section explaining the difference between indigenous, tourist, and other groups in Hawaii she writes, “Some Hawaiian activists even warn about the overusage of the term local and its ability to hide Kanaka Maoli, their culture, and their fight for sovereignty” but doesn’t name those activists or go very in-depth into the struggle of those movements. At the same time, I appreciate that the book is a memoir and is more focused on her personal journey than the history of political movements. 

There were many stories that made me cringe and ache with sadness for a woman who was so betrayed and so betrayed or acted poorly in return, and there were also many sections that made me reflect on how I also feel distance from the culture of my ancestors. Overall, a good read with a lot of great information on Hawaiian traditions. Freedom for all indigenous struggles!

“On the morning of her wedding, Piglet awoke in the dark, curtains closed, to the feeling of Christmas, to the feeling of a funeral.”

I flew through this book, but despite that and the intense second-hand embarrassment and horror, not much gripped me. Maybe I’ve been a vegetarian for too long for the dripping meat descriptions to appeal, but I think it was also a lack of follow-through that disappointed me. For a book about women’s hunger, and especially one that touched on eating disorders, we only received the most surface level information about Piglet's relationship with her body. She feels too tall, she wears glasses, and she’s bigger than her posh mother-in-law to-be, but I wanted more from her on her ideas of her body, and especially more on her relationship with her sister.

“Am I North Korean? That's where I was born and raised. Or am I Chinese? I became an adult there, didn't I? Or am I South Korean? I have the same blood as people here, the same ethnicity. But how does my South Korean ID make me South Korean? People here treat North Koreans as servants, as inferior?”

Hyeonseo Lee went through so many harrowing journeys, it was hard to put this book down. At the same time, her descriptions of her own self-loathing and the horrible choices she had to make were difficult to read. This was an incredible look at the struggles of North and South Koreans, and a timely reminder that asylum is never an easy process and need protecting everywhere.