Zaman archives a personal journey that’s intimate and attuned to a wider cultural moment. A staggering work filled with presence, I Am Yours provides a profound explanation of love, delivered as an act of witness ... An epistolary to love, Zaman’s story is stunning ... Powerfully vulnerable and eloquent, Zaman’s voice is a fire—full-throated, wide-open, and roaring.
Zaman can write beautifully about the frustration and pain of being a woman in a man’s world, an immigrant in a world suspicious of outsiders ... Still, a glorified journal is confined by the limits of its own scope. Zaman’s writing seems to have inspired her—she tells us so—but it’s too navel-gazing to inspire the reader.
[Zaman] seamlessly weaves the intersection of her racial identity and gender identity, skillfully exploring the compounding oppression and inherent racism ... Her story is told with an exacting, at times, compulsive attention to detail ... an intensely vivid tapestry that threads intimacy with realism, that captures the particularities of childhood ... There is an unwavering confidence to Zaman’s prose ... Zaman does not look away from trauma, she does not let us sit outside it, watch from the window. We are forced inside the room ... This insistence on resisting categorization and oppression, both systematic and intimate, is the beating bloodied heart of I Am Yours ... an unabashed declaration of self-love.
... utterly unique ... Reema’s book teems with gorgeous metaphors ... Not surprisingly, Reema is also a virtuoso with narrative voice ... By writing her way to this realization, Reema teaches us a new way to think about self-love and self-care and all the terms we use today to envision total connectedness to oneself. She teaches us that something magical—perhaps revolutionary—happens when we engage in dialogue with ourselves...
The strength of the narrative portrays how a person who has contended with enormous tragedy can summon the resolve to confront and rise above it, and courageously share it with others ... Memoir fans will appreciate Zaman's journey.
