You Get What You Pay For
Essays
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In her “witty and searing” first essay collection, award-winning poet Morgan Parker examines “the cultural legacy of Black womanhood and the meaning of finding ‘well-being’ in a world that wasn’t built for you” (Vogue).
“Riveting and deeply personal . . . filled with poignant insights.”—Cosmopolitan
Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery.
In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.
With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman’s psyche—and of the writer’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Morgan Parker has a razor-sharp mind and an eye for both beauty and BS, which has made her poetry collections like Magical Negro essential reading. And with her debut essay collection, she doesn’t miss the mark. After laying out her position as a Black Millennial woman who grew up in a comfortable southern California suburb, Parker spends every essay examining and interrogating those not-so-simple facts. So while an essay about Bill Cosby begins with a variation of the familiar “Did he do it?” conversation, it quickly spirals outward into a far more interesting examination of what The Cosby Show meant not only to her own childhood, but to Black America at large. Throughout each essay, Parker smartly returns to the theme of how Black women manage to exist in an American culture that sees them, at best, as inessential. Don’t miss this witty and thoughtful essay collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For African Americans, "becoming a person, forming an identity" is a "sham assignment from the start," according to this graceful and deeply personal essay collection from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Parker (Magical Negro). Cataloging a lifetime's worth of mental health struggles, Parker teases out the disadvantage Black Americans are at psychologically ("Before you can ‘find yourself,' you have to first find the fake self and question how it got put there"). Among other gut-wrenching recollections that center on mental health and racism, she recounts facing pushback for wanting to go to therapy as a teen ("If Blackness was essentially defined by resilience through unimaginable struggle, what indeed did I really have to cry about?") and an incident where white classmates pointed and laughed at an extension that had fallen out of her hair ("For me, a serious function of racism is embarrassment.... I mean wanting to be erased"). These memories are presented in fluid tandem with Parker's astute reflections on such pop culture figures as Serena Williams and Bill Cosby, resulting in a brilliant excavation of the profound link between Black identity and Black mental health ("You see yourself as something to be corrected rather than someone to be helped") that doubles as a harrowing expression of the relentlessly damaging personal impact of racism. This is breathtaking.
