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You Get What You Pay for: Essays - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

You Get What You Pay for: Essays

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A collection of essays that run the gamut from alienation to American Christianity. Morgan Parker’s narrative voice is always a welcome companion, no matter the subject, and with her keen eye and observative prowess, this is no exception.

 The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces the difficulty and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery.

In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America’s cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman’s psyche—and of the writer’s search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

ISBN-13: 9780525511441

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: One World

Publication Date: 03-12-2024

Pages: 224

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and winner of a Pushcart Prize, Parker has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” She received her bachelor’s in anthropology and creative writing from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Parker is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and creator/co-curator of the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. Morgan Parker lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.