RaveAutostraddleStunning and incisive ... Although the book is focused on Specter’s experiences as a young person and young adult, she also includes the voices of many other writers and thinkers to create a narrative that is not only masterfully but deeply, deeply necessary in our current cultural climate.
Venita Blackburn
RaveAutostraddle\"Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control ... It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t ... We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.\
Jenn Shapland
RaveAutostraddleA masterful, incisive, and intellectually moving piece of work that I couldn’t stop reading and annotating. When I finished it, I wanted to immediately reread it and make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Sarah Viren
RaveAutostraddle\"It not only brings us through a philosophical exploration of these concepts but it also becomes a challenge to Woolf’s conception of a before self and a now self. How can we so easily box ourselves and our experiences into two separate worlds, two separate planes, two separate selves? ... She takes us through the history of these ethical preoccupations through the works of Plato, Socrates, Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Kurt Vonnegut to, hopefully, uncover exactly why the truth is so valuable and how we should wield it as a means to becoming freer.\
Amelia Possanza
RaveAutostraddleI think a lot of the stories Possanza uncovered for this book will be unfamiliar to people — both queer and not queer — and that is part of what makes reading it so enthralling ... As you’re reading through the narrative Possanza was able to piece together and, sometimes, creatively fill in the missing pieces of the lives of these people, she also expertly weaves in the stories of her own life that have some relation to the stories she’s unearthed for us.
Lamya H
RaveAutostraddleThe memoir is masterfully constructed and mapped out, split between three parts with each one spanning time and space instead of going in chronological order ... Lamya shares poignant and incisive reflections on queerness and gender and how we perform them both, white supremacy in the U.S. and abroad, friendship, familial love, and the importance of carving out a path for yourself that works for you ... There is not a single hard transition in any of the essays here, and their ability to move so easily through the stories of the Quran and their own life emphasizes the weight of the importance of Islam in their life.
Michelle Tea
RaveAutostraddleWe are given a front row seat to these three years that Tea and Orson (and their friends and their families) spent consumed with the hopes of them eventually becoming parents. Tea narrates the ups and downs of the process with her trademark humor and doesn’t shy away from giving us all of the gory, sad, disappointing, and heart-wrenching details that became parts of their paths to parenthood ... She provides us with a heavy dosage of education on the subjects of insemination, IVF, and childbirth, but it never feels overwhelming. In the parts of the story that are the most devastating, Tea’s faith in the universe and in the world around her shines through her writing to show us how courage and resilience are powerful tools we should utilize in the face of any hardships we may encounter, whether they’re related to Tea’s journey here or not ... Knocking Myself Up is, of course, extremely queer — and not just because Tea is or just in the cast of past lovers and friends who show up in the narrative — but also in the way Tea approaches the memories of this journey overall ... Some might see the subject of this book and think it’s simply not for them, but taken as a whole, Tea’s work here absolutely transcends any expectations someone could possibly have simply by looking at the description.
Lars Horn
RaveAutostraddleAs Horn narrates the various experiences and encounters of their life, they construct a world where fluidity between meanings, between the human world and the natural world, between ourselves and other people, and between our conceptions of who we are and who we should be is not seen as dangerous ... Horn’s work rewrites how so many people think of identity as a fixed thing that is constantly knowable to us, that is an inherent part of our humanity ... What’s especially magical about Horn’s work in this text is that they don’t necessarily attempt to come to some final answer about the questions they pose ... As the book concludes, it becomes obvious that the work of this text is bigger than Horn and their body alone. The text of the book is fragmentary, often jumping between the narration of the various stories of Horn’s life to the historical and scientific information they are juxtaposing it with, and is anchored by a recurring listed essay recounting an experience they had at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. Although the nature of the form might be a little difficult for some, the form is part of what makes Horn’s work so appealing to me. Although they don’t explicitly say this, Horn’s work is essentially an archival one.
