Everything I Never Wanted to Know (21st Century Essays)
Description
“A dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” —Publishers Weekly
In Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the US. She explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who practiced in Hume’s home state of Michigan; and other material. In these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence, Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what we don’t want to see, what we’d rather not believe, and what some of us have long tried to forget.
Praise for Everything I Never Wanted to Know (21st Century Essays)
“A dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” —Publishers Weekly
“Mesmerizingly articulate … Everything I Never Wanted to Know is a collection of essays that combine the analytical, lyrical, and experimental to explore the continued resonances and limitations of the discussion around sexual predation. Nothing is simple in this book, and there are no heroes.” —Juliana Spahr, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Provocative and intelligent … gives voice to the many ways females (and other marginalized people) are stripped of their power by (White) male misogyny. A thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study.” —Kirkus
“In her essays, Hume writes with a discerning and complicating gaze … [Her] book does not answer any questions, for the questions are not neat … It imagines what it might mean to not only look at the dynamics of gender, violence, and criminality, but to actually process what we’ve seen.” —Ilana Bean, Cleveland Review of Books
“Using personal experience, history (the 1940s Nylon Riots), and current events (Larry Nasser), Hume weaves meandering, compelling, erudite essays firmly based in feminism.… For any and all readers ready to work their brains around serious issues.” —Kathy Sexton, Booklist
“Christine Hume brings a poet’s precision and artfulness to every subject she tackles, but Everything I Never Wanted to Know feels like her greatest work yet. Every dark corner of American suburbia is on trial here through lenses personal, anthropological, sociopolitical, and even metaphysical. What emerges is a work unlike any other—this book altered me and my expectations of literature.” —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album
“Everything I Never Wanted to Know asks us to sit with our discomfort and question our impulse to turn away as well as embrace our capacity to go on anyway. [It] performs a gesture more potent than catharsis: a reckoning … The ultimate hope Hume offers readers isn’t the empty promise of a solution, but the steadfast awareness that another way is always possible.” —Elizabeth Hall, Full Stop
“Christine Hume delivers a unique blend of journalism that is deeply embedded in lived experience and life-writing that interrogates the political and bodily contexts in which both writing and life occur. There is inherent sadness in learning what one never wanted to know and great triumph in the self-actualization and liberation Hume finds there.” —Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition