Gentrifier
A Memoir
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.
In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.
This is also a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf’s declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write”; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore’s neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism was jokes?
Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A "free" house comes with costly strings attached in this wry memoir by journalist and artist Moore (Body Horror). In 2016, Moore, after nearly a decade spent traveling as a freelance journalist, moved into a bungalow purchased and renovated by a Detroit arts institution as part of a program to support low-income writers while helping to revitalize local neighborhoods "at risk of devastation." As a "white girl in a Bengali Muslim neighborhood in a majority Black city," Moore wrestles with her complicity in gentrification (though she's told that the house had been abandoned for eight years before she moved in) and documents her interactions with her neighbors, including a pair of teenage girls with whom she trades local gossip and discusses hijabs, blessing ceremonies, and other aspects of Muslim culture. She also chafes under the arts organization's "unwritten" rule that she must provide "free, on-call, twenty-four-hour publicity and marketing support" for the program, and, after taking out a loan to replace the crumbling roof, discovers that the house's ownership history is murkier than she'd been led to believe. Throughout, Moore weaves incisive reflections on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, sexism and classism in the arts and publishing worlds, urban gardening, and the "media narrative surrounding Detroit." The result is a trenchant meditation on how communities come together, and the forces that drive them apart.
