Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home Reviews

• 
  Danika at The Lesbrary

  I feel like I am totally unqualified to talk about this book. It's like someone cracking open her ribcge and showing you what's inside, while fixing you with a glare like vulnerability is the most badass and resilient thing you can do.
• 
  Sassafras Lowrey

  yay for queer femme survivor storytelling
• 
  K Agbebiyi

  I walked through New York with Leah, I organized, I fell in love, I ran away, I found my way back home.
  I held my breath the entire time while reading this, it’s beautiful. Helped me fill the little Zami-sized hole in my heart.
• 
  CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian

  I need some time to process this book. I felt underwhelmed by it for about the first half, then ended up really loving some of the writing in the last half. This may be because the first half is earlier work before Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha honed her craft, but for a while I was disappointed in this memoir, which I was expecting to love because I was blown away by her last poetry collection. Overall I think this memoir just suffers from the unevenness of the quality of writing. I love the style of short snippets of life and non-chronological telling (and Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha does this very well in the last quarter of the book especially), but because the writing wasn't fantastic in the first part, and there wasn't a narrative to latch onto, the first sections of the memoir lag. They didn't grab me with either beautiful writing or narrative and I had to push myself to keep reading, which I'm glad I did, the second half being what it is.
  I fully acknowledge for folks who've gone through some of the same struggles this is likely a life-changing, five star read, but it just wasn't that for me.
  
  More
  random thoughts on this book on my blog.
• 
  Ai Miller

  This books was really incredible--it hurt but there's also so much heart and I literally couldn't put it down. I read it in like two hours in the middle of the night, and couldn't sleep for a little bit afterwards because it had wriggled into my brain and the narration style wouldn't leave me alone. It like. Oozes compassion, which is a bad word to describe it, but that's all that comes to mind. The compassion like seeps out of this book and into your brain and I walked away from it wanting to think more about compassion and justice, about compassion and survival, and about how that survival is made, like its very building blocks. I feel so inadequate writing this review, but it was so good and I just want more people to read it and feel their own versions of what I felt reading it.
• 
  Sinclair

  Raw, gritty, unpolished, and in that there is revealed deep truth. Very readable, I zoomed through it in a day and didn't want to put it down. Reads like a string of short connected stories, some more like poems, some essays. Leah's interesting dive into growing up not knowing her racial identity, and having to discover it in a social context, reminds me a lot of queerness and the construction of those identities too.
• 
  Kimberly

  This was a challenging read for me. It was way out of my wheelhouse and not something I’d pick up on my own. It made me uncomfortable. It made me contemplative. It made me aware of another person’s experience and how it shaped her into the person she is today.
  
  For me, this was a Bildungsroman. The narrative didn’t flow sequentially, it meandered back and forth over the years, and set itself primarily in the 1990s. Leah shared her story of the discovery of herself. She talked about growing up as a single child and how her parents treated her. She left home relatively early and went to Canada with the intention of immigrating. I found it interesting that she was so intent on becoming Canadian. It seems that she wanted to be very different from her parents, and yet was somewhat the same as them in that she left her birth country to make a new life elsewhere (like her father did as a young man). There were other similarities as well. I think it’s true that we’re not always so very different from our parents, now matter how hard we try to be. And yet, we are our own person.
  
  Her new life wasn’t an easy one. Leah discussed her struggles and her poverty, her independence and her disability, her struggle to find her identity and her success in doing so. It was a fascinating journey.
  
  While I didn’t identify with a number of aspects of Leah’s journey, there were many aspects that I think are universal and with which I could identify. I don’t think being a teenager is easy for anyone, and I completely understood Leah’s struggle to manoeuvre through these formative years. I grew up in and around Toronto, and I was drawn to her characterization of this wonderful city, although, it wasn’t always great to her. Sometimes, I felt like she was talking about a different city entirely, but I think that was due to her experience of it, which was very different from mine.
  
  All in all, this was an eye-opening read. Although it’s not the type of book I usually read, I’m glad to have read it.
• 
  Z

  It’s not easy to explain, but this book feels alive. Excellent, poignant, and memorable. Piepzna-Samarasinha beautifully captures the inner and outer environments of life, love, and learning in queer communities of color and the world. Her vivid descriptive style appeals to the senses, making one want to reach for a blanket while reading about a coatless Toronto winter. At other times, you can feel yourself dancing or falling in love. Anyone who has lived through similar experiences during the era she describes will remember the close link between personal and political struggles, and how people lived it instead of just talking about it. She also handles complex, painful family relationships honestly, listening between her parents’ words to hear the things they won’t -- or can’t -- say. This valuable historical perspective makes this more than a coming-of-age novel. A more appropriate term, to borrow from Audre Lorde's ZAMI, would be 'biomythography'. This isn't to question the veracity of DIRTY RIVER, rather to praise it and try to describe it power and depth. Throughout the book, Piepzna-Samarasinha depicts the changing realities of living between cultures: not fully accepted as South Asian among Toronto’s queer communities, but finally defining her identity and thriving in communities that are as brilliantly diverse as the real world itself. As a librarian, I’d recommend this to faculty and students of English, Creative Writing, Gender and Women’s Studies, and perhaps History and Politics too. Have already requested purchase. Highly recommended.
• 
  Megan

  Profoundly affecting. I finished this with hand on heart. A complex, nuanced, and tremendously moving memoir--adopting a nonlinear structure loosely comparable to Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water (cited in the Acknowledgments as an influence)--that addresses coming into mixed-race queer crip identity, surviving/confronting childhood abuse and partner abuse, finding and forming community/home/family; while capturing the queer POC scene in Toronto in the mid/late 90s. Vivid writing; an inspiring read.
• 
  yuni

  i feel invigorated, i feel achy. i survived some things, i shared something beautiful and unhealthy with a femme who made me cry like that, both good and bad. i take joy in my queerness, my sensuality, how attuned i am to pleasure, and i’ve also been afraid of my life, confined to my bed like a stain, looking to cis men for answers. i am both not brave enough and also worthy of forgiving myself for all the ways i’ve been taught to fear being really free, being really in love w the world and all that i can give to it. i ate too quickly and i need to come back to this after a lot of processing
• 
  Dana Neily

  Writing style took a little to get into but once I did I found it was an engaging and important story. Reccomended to anyone wanting to better understand the intersectionality of race, queerness, abuse, and disability.
• 
  Laura Engelken

  You know when a colleague lends you their book to read and you didn’t ask to do so? It then sits on your desk, staring at you - taunting you even - because you can’t in good conscience return it until you’ve read it and it’s getting to the point that you really must return it.
  
  So I finally cracked open this memoir and completed it before the beginning of a new year. I had to struggle through the first couple chapters ins which it felt Piepzna-Samarasinha was trying to lay the shock and strangeness on extra thick. I am mindful that my own cultural background (e.g., my white, midwestern penchant for directness and matter of fact description) may have dampened my appreciation for her prose. It would be interesting to hear other folks’ impressions on this.
  
  I was most impacted by her reflections in a chapter chronicling the tremendous time, effort and intention required to feed herself on $20 for a week. Without drama or hyperbole, Piepzna-Samarasinha illuminated how poverty can exhaust one’s body, mind, and spirit.
  
  The most disappointing aspect of this memoir was the use of repeated phrases/observations in her storytelling. It made me wonder whether she had written and/or published various chapters independently and the pulled them together for a book. For me, it highlighted the disjointed nature of her narrative and made the story seem stale.
• 
  Karen

  I felt like this wasn't that well written. A lot of the sentences read like lists, and there were odd gaps in the story. Like, what was her relationship with Rafi like after they got married? She writes about her second-to-last visit home but not the last, or her decision to stop visiting. It felt inconsistent, like she'd give a lot of detail about a specific incident but spotty information about what followed.
• 
  BK

  "It's queer Black and brown femme love work we do. Love labor. We are pursuing PhDs in how to get good, good love that's not bullshit."
  
  "What comes after the disaster we keep surviving every day?"
  
  
• 
  Anna

  So good that after I finished it, I immediately read it again.
• 
  Clementine Morrigan

  This is a beautiful and important book. The rich descriptions of Toronto are a bonus.
• 
  Jamie Canaves

  I usually read non-fiction a couple chapters at a time between inhaling fiction. I’m not really sure why, but I do.
  
  In this case I inhaled this book.
  
  Before I was even halfway through reading I had already looked up her back catalog to read.
  
  Leah’s writing is poetic and impactful. Her details, like knowing the price of food items and the cheapest meal she could make to literally survive off of, had a way of crawling into me and putting me beside her. Her journey from being a brown girl in the US with a white mother, to seeking out POC, to finding her identity--in Canada after years of struggle--was heartbreaking and beautiful, told in a voice that flowed beautifully from storytelling to a poetic narrative. It was a perfect balance when she spoke of things like abuse, poverty, and racism.
  
  I think my favorite part of her memoir was her appetite for reading from a young age (taught to her by her mother) and how she discussed books from different parts of her life, along with libraries, and bookstores that were significant.
  
  This is certainly a book I’d recommend even to readers who aren’t huge fans of non-fiction because the voice is so wonderful it reads almost like fiction.
• 
  Hannah

  this is an important book. this is a book in a long lineage of femme writers, and a long lineage of healers and survivors. these are the kinds of stories we need to exist, to be told, to be retold, to be shared, and to be preserved and passed down. femme and survival are both lineages; we need the stories of elders to show us possible shapes for our futures. and we need love stories that are this kind of complicated, the kind of complicated that is twisted up with big power and longtime patterns and abuse and cycles, above all. here we learn what we might be, both what we can dare to desire, and what we might become without liberation, without care, without resilience. dirty river is a book for which i am deeply grateful: for inspiration, for teaching, and for modeling the deep femmedom of extreme vulnerability and honesty.
• 
  Lauren

  I read this book during a week of total personal chaos, which is a caveat to everything I am about to say here.
  
  I feel like I fell into this book, like I started reading it and suddenly it was all around me. The narrative jumps back and forth in time and circles around. This threw me off, but in a way that made me pay closer attention to the present of the words. I think, especially for able-bodied, straight, white folks, this novel is a gift, an insight into a world often overlooked and unseen. I loved the ways in which I felt similar to the author (bi person in straight relationship/familial trauma), and also the ways in which I am so different. This novel is so open-hearted and vulnerable, it's hard not to curl up next to it and just listen to it breathe.
• 
  Amanda

  I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy this book after the rocky start of the first couple of chapters, but it quickly picked up the pace and was an engaging and brutally honest self-examination of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality. She says aloud things that I imagine we only say to our secret selves and would never dare share with another human being (or maybe that's just me). However, the editing of this book was incredibly lazy. It was painfully repetitive and seemed that she had combined a series of essays into a memoir without double-checking that they actually seamlessly fit together.
• 
  Hilo

  Überlebenskampf, Armut, Inzest in Form von sexualisierter Gewalt, häusliche Gewalt, aber auch Migration, Erwachsenwerden, Sexualität, den eigenen Weg finden, die eigenen Menschen - Leah erzählt ne einzigartige Geschichte, die doch soviele vertraute Komponenten für mich hat. Ich schätze es sehr wie sie soviele Menschen die ihr auf dem Weg geholfen haben, beim Namen nennt. Ich gebe dem Buch aber nicht alle Sterne, weil ich nicht so mit der sexuellen Sprache klarkam - fisting fisting fisting - und als Survivorbuch mir da irgendwie ne Behutsamkeit gefehlt hat.
• 
  Laura

  Sometimes when you go to a book reading and think - "this is gonna be so great" you go home and read it and realise all the best parts were read at the reading and it really doesn't feel the same without the author's physical voice - but this book was every bit as good as the reading!
  I loved the journey that was the book.
  Also I love books that are written in Toronto - this city that is my home.
• 
  Emory Black

  This book was like a friend for a bit there, in that I understood and related to bits of it (e.g. pain, poverty, persisting). Some of it is outside my realm of experience so I am happy to have learned about it (e.g. not being sure where you fit in culturally). It was a sharing of things that takes a lot of courage (at least, I think it does) and I appreciate it.
  
  CWs (that I can remember, it's a pretty heavy, realistic, book): childhood sexual abuse, spousal abuse, restricted eating
• 
  Tori

  i finally finished reading this memoir after avoiding it for a few weeks. as a queer femme/ish of color who wonders what 'home' means, it resonated on many frequencies. it serves me well to remember that this memoir is a 'mix-tape' of stories. sometimes the mix-tape had scratches and/or was set onto repeat one or three too many times for my taste. and. i celebrate the author's fucking determination to finish their memoir despite it taking 10 years. yes.
• 
  Jaclyn

  2.5 stars. I love memoirs, but much of what makes a memoir impactful is the author’s ability to convey “you probably haven’t been through what I’ve been through but this is how xy or z made me feel, and maybe you’ve felt that way too.” This book failed to do that for me, and I just couldn’t relate to the author or why their transformation happened the way it did. The writing style was also very rambly, sprinkled with some poetry and then explaining of things.
• 
  M.

  This was one of those books that fell into my hands, a rapid exchange, zine trade of my own work for the book. And I didn't know what to expect so I just start reading it and chapters in kept having that uncanny sensation... The timing/rhythm is strong. A crossroads interaction. A book that did a mixed race working class survivor like me good.
• 
  Jacob Wren

  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes:
  
  I was twenty-one years old. Which is the age of some of the youth I work with and love, and now that I am no longer twenty-one, I can see just how young and old they are. At the time, I didn't know how to feel my youth or my age. I was a crazy girl-bomb old young woman, but no way in hell was I young in any way that meant vulnerable.
• 
  Lindsay

  Terrific memoir of being a survivor and discovering the sometimes-terrible, sometimes-heartening truths about one's self and family. It had such a transportive sense of time and place. The only drawback for me was that the end felt a bit abrupt and disjointed, but it never stopped me loving words she was putting down on the page. Can't wait to read more by Piepzna-Samarasinha.
• 
  Alexis

  God, I love the way Leah writes. She is one of my favourite writers this year. This book is her memoir. It's presented in a collection of short essays, some of which read like poems. She traces a history of abuse, poverty, and the discovery of her identity as a mixed white Sri Lankan woman. I found this book captivating and honest. I really love her work.