“One of the more difficult dimensions of reading Mean is the sense one gets of a life spoiled, damaged, likely beyond recovery. The loss is poignant … Language becomes the artful manner through which Gurba can articulate the particularity of her experience while connecting it to the abuse that others, like Sophia, have suffered … In Gurba’s hands, the interruption of straight chronology serves more than just rhetorical or dramatic effect; it foregrounds the burdens of memory on the body … Mean demands our attention not only as a painfully timely story, but also as an artful memoir. It bears striking comparison to Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, a book about its author’s own tale of abuse, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a delicious recounting of its author’s own complex erotic intimacies. Like both writers, Gurba turns the complexity of her story into art … Mean is a powerful, vital book about damage and the ghostly afterlives of abuse.”
–Jonathan Alexander, The Los Angeles Review of Books, December 11, 2017
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