PositiveThe New MexicanIf you have never passed as a member of another race, had your own ethnicity constantly misread by strangers, or identified with a culture more strongly than with your own, Hilton Als’ new collection of essays will indeed be a strange journey. Through a mix of reportage and madcap monologues, The New Yorker writer has crafted an unusually sensuous book, tracking a long arc of artists and lovers who long for nothing more than to live in the skins of others ... A \'white girl\' is a calling card and a cultural echo that the writer claims can be found rattling through the voices in his profiles: Truman Capote, Eminem, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor ... In reading White Girls, one gets the sense that the lives of these artists and racial and sexual nonconformers are not marginal so much as marginalized by a society that lacks the words to describe them and the will to recognize them.
