Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay

⭐ 9.0/10

(Originally written by Magdalene)

This is a collection of essays written by Roxane Gay, who wrote one of my favourite memoirs, Hunger. Despite the title, this book addresses a wide variety of themes, but with a pretty big focus on different types of media and representation, especially of Black people and women. She also included a few more personal essays, and I particularly enjoyed the ones about her first year of teaching (very relatable for me) and her experiences as a competitive Scrabble player.

Roxane is fascinating, because she is so, so smart, but also unapologetically loves things like terrible reality TV. She's so good at analyzing media and also knows so much about pop culture.

I really enjoyed most of the essays, and they are all quite short, so I often read several in one sitting. There were a few that I skimmed, though, when she was discussing a book or movie in detail, but I had never seen/read it or had no interest in the topic. Most of them were great, though. The possibility of picking and choosing only the essays that appeal to you is one of the benefits of essay collections anyway.