RaveVogueZadie Smith is bringing the anxiety of quarantine firmly into the literary fold ... Smith’s struggle—and the struggles of parents across the world attempting to balance work, distance learning, and what might once have been called a personal life—is deeply real, and she neither downplays nor aggrandizes it, acknowledging her own newly acquired class privilege ... Smith’s essay skillfully and effectively relates the virus currently plaguing America to the one that has killed and brutalized scores of Black people since the country’s founding: structural racism ... Ultimately, Intimations feels less like a precise attempt to document the COVID-19 era than a more abstract meditation on time: who is given it, who has it taken from them, and what its sudden presence or absence can lead to ... Intimations functions impressively as a document of the mixed blessing of time as well as a searing excoriation of a society that has always apportioned it unevenly.
Chanel Miller
RaveVogue... reads like a preemptive strike against those who would discredit [Miller] ... As blurry and painful as Miller’s story of assault is, she still manages to wrest control of her narrative. Her prose is relatable and effective; her comedic gift, honed at stand-up shows in Philadelphia after the assault, is clear even within a dark tale; her use of metaphor is crystal clear ... None of that feels quite like the point, though. If Miller weren’t such a skilled writer, would that be a mark against her? Make her less credible, less worthy of our attention? Do survivors like Miller deserve to have sympathy parceled out to them based on how fluidly they relate their trauma? ... To tell her story at all is enough, first in her victim impact statement and now in Know My Name; the fact that Miller tells it beautifully, caring enough for her reader to spin golden sentences from her pain, is a gift on top of a gift. It almost feels like more than we deserve, like we’re taking something from her that we have no business asking for, but that doesn’t seem to be how Miller feels about it. \"It feels better when the story is outside myself,” she writes in a notebook at one point following the assault, and as the outpouring of support from survivors after her BuzzFeed piece proved, others feel better when she tells her story, too.
