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INTERVIEW: THIRII MYO KYAW MYINT
AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Dennis Shyu
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar, and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, and San José, California. Her stories have been published in numerous journals, and she is the author of a novel, The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven. Her nonfiction debut, Names for Light: A Family History (Graywolf, Aug. 17), is, according to our reviews, an “imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on.” Myint answered our questions by email.
What prompted you to write Names for Light? Was this a book you felt called to write? Ever since my family relocated to the United States when I was 7 years old, I’ve had to act as a cultural interpreter of “my country and my people.” By the time I was in college, my life was consumed with this duty: I was president of the Brown Campaign for Burma, which aimed to spread awareness of the human rights abuses in the country; I tutored families of recently resettled Burmese refugees; I helped a former Burmese political prisoner organize a literary festival at my college. Creative writing was my one relief from this activism—the one place where I allowed myself a break from “raising awareness” about Burma. But as my political activism ran dry over the years due to emotional burnout, I found that a creative space opened up for me. I had always thought that if I wrote about Burma, it would have to be an educational book for a “western audience”—I had not considered the possibility of writing a book that would be for myself and people like me. Names for Light emerged from this question—what would I write if I could write about my sense of identity and belonging on my own terms?
What was it like having a book come out in 2021? How did you connect with readers in this socially distanced year? I had a baby a few months before my book release, so the sleep deprivation combined with the virtual nature of my book tour has made everything feel somewhat unreal! Still, it has been amazing to “see” my friends, family, and writing community attend my virtual events and to connect with students through virtual class visits. While I do miss getting the chance to talk with readers oneon-one at in-person events, I also appreciate the accessibility afforded by virtual programming— without the option of online events, I don’t think I would have been able to travel around the country with a newborn to promote my book.
Who is the ideal reader for Names for Light, and what do you hope they take away from it? Any reader who is willing to put aside—or at least,
be aware of—the assumptions and expectations that they bring to a text is my ideal reader. I think too often writers of color and other marked or marginalized writers are expected to “sell” their marked identity—i.e., “read this book if you want to know what it’s like to be brown/queer/poor/ etc.” My hope is that readers (even those who wanted a straightforward, educational memoir) will come away from Names for Light with an expanded notion of identity.
What work of nonfiction most dazzled you this year? I marveled at Lauren Russell’s Descent, which came out with Tarpaulin Sky in 2020—such a formally innovative, genre-expanding book and a moving example of radical empathy.
Interview by Tom Beer.
passion and commitment shine through on every page. Even readers familiar with the story of the Rev. James Bevel—a “giant of the Civil Rights Movement” and known, protected serial child molester—will share Burke’s anger and heartbreak when they crossed paths in Selma. While working with Black girls in Selma, the author discovered that their healing and renewed sense of self-worth were inextricably tied to her own. Burke’s reckoning with her painful past becomes the blueprint for “me too.” Told with candor and deep vulnerability, this story is raw and sobering but also a source of healing and hope for other survivors.
An unforgettable page-turner of a life story rendered with endless grace and grit.
SURVIVING THE WHITE GAZE A Memoir
Carroll, Rebecca Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) $26.00 | Feb. 2, 2021 978-1-982116-25-5
A probing, wise investigation of racial identity. Throughout the memoir, Carroll, a podcast host and cultural critic who develops a wide variety of content at WNYC, demonstrates the most indelible qualities of the genre: an ability to inhabit a version of one’s self that no longer exists; an instinct for what’s important and what isn’t; and a voice that implies personal growth gained through missteps and ultimately self-knowledge. Born to a White mother and Black father, the author was adopted by a White New Hampshire couple with a laissez-faire approach to parenting and very little concept of race. Growing up with a fierce desire to fit in with the popular White kids at school, she entered into a toxic relationship with her birth mother, Tess, a narcissist who took every opportunity to tear down and interrogate her daughter’s Blackness and self-esteem. The narrative, which reflects the author’s “decades-long, selfinitiated rite of passage,” is a blunt, urgent study of racial identity and an attempt to chronicle “my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness.” Along the way, she encountered a variety of racists, passive and aggressive, and a series of White boys who served as goals to be attained. Carroll also underwent a series of hairstyles, which become symbols for stages of self-actualization. But the heart of the book lies in her back and forth with Tess, who cast a spell on her daughter even as she spewed racist venom and situated herself more as a jealous peer than a dutiful parent. Carroll’s quest for authenticity fuels the text, but there’s also a quietly tragic subtext of failed parenting, of the many ways one generation can put its own needs before those of the next. The author deftly untangles these pitfalls, creating a specific and personal story that is also compelling for general readers.
A deeply resonant memoir of hard-won authenticity.
how to make an apple pie from scratch
FLOATING IN A MOST PECULIAR WAY A Memoir
ChudeSokei, Louis Mariner Books (240 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 2, 2021 978-1-328-84158-2
A distinguished literary scholar delivers an affecting memoir of life as an exile, with a David Bowie soundtrack in the background.
“We were from Biafra, mind you. Not Nigeria.” So writes Boston University professor Chude-Sokei, who left his homeland after what has been called “Africa’s first televised war.” His father, a major, died in the conflict—assassinated, it was said— whereupon his mother, a Jamaican, returned to her native country with her young son. “All I had with me when I arrived in Jamaica,” writes the author, “was a song, not an Igbo song but a Western one played on the radio about floating in space and choosing never to come down. It was a song about someone named Major Tom, and it eventually became my only memory of my origins in Africa.” Early on, as he shows in this forthright, deftly profound narrative, he stood as a definitive outsider, given to reading what an aunt called “foolish space books,” among the many things left behind when his mother moved her family to America. In the U.S., Chude-Sokei discovered further mysteries, including something he’d never heard before— the N-word—and something he’d never encountered before: an odd sort of racism that came at him from both sides, from Whites and from Blacks, such as a teacher who informed his schoolmates that “Africans were backward and spent all their time killing one another, like in Uganda and Biafra, and were an embarrassment to real black people.” With Bowie’s “Space Oddity” as his madeleine, the author grew up to explore both his adopted country and his native one. Just as Major Tom died along with his creator, so Chude-Sokei’s old world was eventually foreclosed as his cancer-stricken mother extracted a promise from him to bury her in Nigeria. And so he did, “placing my mother’s remains next to my father’s grave near the house he’d built for her before the war scattered us.”
A beautifully written contribution to recent work of the African diaspora.
UNWELL WOMEN Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
Cleghorn, Elinor Dutton (400 pp.) $27.00 | June 8, 2021 978-0-593-18295-6
A feminist historian and cultural critic explores how age-old myths about gender roles and behaviors have shaped the history of medicine.
Medical science is notorious for misunderstanding the ailments of female bodies. Throughout this illuminating and disturbing survey, Cleghorn argues convincingly that this is because medicine is a patriarchal science. Hippocrates believed that the uterus controlled women’s health. Following in his footsteps, later Greek physicians blamed female illness on “wandering womb[s].” The author suggests that Hippocrates’ ideas aligned with the prevailing view that women existed solely for the purposes of childbearing/rearing. Hippocratic misogyny became entrenched in later European cultural and medical thinking, as suggested by how more “enlightened” doctors from the 18th century still blamed (White) women’s physical and emotional pains on reproductive malfunctions. Enslaved women of color fared far worse: At best, they were the objects of cruel experiments because White patriarchy had deemed them unable to feel pain. By the mid-1800s, early suffragists like Harriet Taylor Mill, whom doctors diagnosed with “nervous disorders,” began to more openly question the patriarchal status quo. But the patriarchal establishment used the old argument of hysteria to discredit them and their political activities. As White women became more socially empowered in the 20th century, medicine became another tool of patriarchy to control them. In the 1920s and ’30s, the American medical establishment sanctioned forced sterilization of thousands of Black Southern women “in the name of social improvement.” A decade later in Britain, the British government controlled White female reproduction with welfare programs designed to “encourage women to produce and nurture citizens of the future.” Thoughtful and often disturbing, this exhaustively researched book shows why women—including minority women and Cleghorn herself, who has lupus—must fight to be heard in a system that not only ignores them, but often makes them sicker.
Powerful, provocative, necessary reading.
HOW TO MAKE AN APPLE PIE FROM SCRATCH In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe—From the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang
Cliff, Harry Doubleday (400 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 10, 2021 978-0-385-54565-5
An entertainingly accurate account of how everything in the universe came to be, as told by a leading experimental physicist and popularizer.
Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” On July 4, 2012, the scientific community celebrated Higgsdependence Day, when the more than 10,000 physicists from around the world who had worked together for more 15 years announced conclusive evidence for the Higgs boson, the “God particle.” Without the Higgs boson and all the other star stuff that
makes the universe and holds it together, butter, flour, water, and apples wouldn’t exist, and bakeries would have nothing to sell. In his first book, Cliff, a particle physicist at Cambridge and researcher at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, brings physics down to Earth and persuades us that even if one can easily buy fruit and pie crusts, we should still care about their deep origins. Through a clear knowledge of many areas of physics as well as individual physicists, years spent in hands-on work at CERN, the instincts of a good storyteller, and a wicked sense of humor, Cliff draws readers into the bizarre and beautiful world inside the atom, offering an accessible education on the “standard model…a deceptively boring name for one of humankind’s greatest intellectual achievements. Developed over decades through the combined efforts of thousands of theorists and experimentalists, [it] says that everything we see around us—galaxies, stars, planets, and people—is made of just a few different types of particles, which are bound together inside atoms and molecules by a small number of fundamental forces.” In addition to the ins and outs of the Standard Model, this outstanding book, sometimes as funny as The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, will also teach readers why experimental subjects are often called “guinea pigs.”
The book for anyone who wants to understand some of the world’s most important scientific questions.
CHILDREN UNDER FIRE An American Crisis
Cox, John Woodrow Ecco/HarperCollins (336 pp.) $28.99 | March 30, 2021 978-0-06-288393-3
In a stellar debut, Cox expands his Washington Post series on the invisible wounds of children damaged by gun violence, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
In 2016, after the fatal shooting of a classmate at her South Carolina school, 7-year-old Ava Olsen was so traumatized that she developed severe PTSD. She even used stickers to cover up the “scary words” in Little House on the Prairie: “gun, fire, blood, kill.” In this powerful report on the emotional scars left by gun violence, Cox argues that Ava is one of millions of American children “who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims by our legal system but who have, nonetheless, been irreparably harmed by the epidemic.” With deep sympathy for his young subjects, he probes the roots of—and possible solutions to—the crisis, taking sharp aim at the $3 billion school security market, which exploits parental fears by touting products of unproven worth, such as “$150 bulletproof backpacks.” But the beating heart of the narrative consists of the heart-rending stories of vulnerable children. Ava’s pen pal Tyshaun McPhatter wouldn’t let his mother wash a sweatshirt worn by his father, murdered in Washington, D.C., so he’d remember the scent. Her schoolmate Siena Kibilko, prepared for another shooting, had picked out a hiding spot at school “where she just knew the gunman wouldn’t think to look.” Especially moving is the story of Ava’s 6-year-old superhero-loving classmate, Jacob Hall, killed in the shooting at her school and laid out at his funeral in a Batman costume, mourned at the church by friends dressed in his honor as Captain America and other superheroes. Cox analyzes the gun crisis astutely, but his surpassing achievement in this eloquent book is to let children speak for themselves about their grief. Put this one on a shelf with Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here—and have a box of tissues handy.
An indispensable contribution to the debate about gun violence.
WHAT WHITE PEOPLE CAN DO NEXT From Allyship to Coalition
Dabiri, Emma Perennial/HarperCollins (176 pp.) $13.99 paper | June 22, 2021 978-0-06-311271-1
Both a blazing polemic against the concept of race as anything more than a means to create racism as well as a fundamental route toward active unification.
In this follow-up to her excellent debut, Twisted (2020), Dabiri once again pulls no punches, offering a sharp, relevant critique and deconstruction of racial categorizations, particularly the common assumption of White people as the default norm. “If whiteness is defined as ‘not being the other’ and the subordination of that other,” she writes, “then a reversal of status is deeply threatening to a person’s identity.” Deploying chapter titles like “Stop the Denial,” “Interrogate Capitalism,” and “Redistribute Resources,” the author is consistently direct and urgent in her presentation. Skewering reductive online commentary and hollow performative gestures, Dabiri writes, “we seem to have replaced doing anything with saying something, in a space where the word ‘conversation’ has achieved an obscenely inflated importance as a substitute for action.” The author also describes inherent deficiencies of allyship—“offering charity at the expense of solidarity”—and makes a compelling case for vigorous coalition-building, which requires recognizing shared interests and working together for the greater good. She references scholars and authors such as Angela Davis, Fred Moten, Barbara Fields, George Lipsitz, bell hooks, and Cornel West to support her studied claims and intentional provocations. “In the history of humankind,” she writes, “ ‘white people’ are babies. You have only existed since 1661! (To be fair, so have ‘black people.’)” Dabiri dismisses Whiteness as “a generic term that collapses crucial distinctions in order to consolidate capital.” Related to her argument that the B in black should not be capitalized because it reinforces division instead of dismantling it, she explains that she regularly places quotation marks around “black” and “white” to disrupt “the comfort with which we rely on that terminology.”
