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Suburban Legend: A Memoir
You ever hear the one about a girlhood stolen, then reclaimed?
Darkly humorous and casually devastating, this autobiographical collage reads like a locked, hot pink Y2K diary full of suburban darkness, chronicling Diana's Myspace-era coming of age. As she makes the transition from numbed-out teen to young adult, she finds herself unable to move forward in her own tale of romantic love. To find her future, she has to come to terms with and take back a childhood ripped off by incest and abuse.
Each essay puts dark memories in new outfits: late-night confessions to AIM chatbot SmarterChild, every romantic first for better or for worse, police reports, found poems from therapy, and conversations of a Vietnamese family marked by cycles of violence.
Experience the hot, chaotic world of a trauma-fractured girl on a quest to find out if happiness—and not just technical survival—is possible. But how will she know what the bright, glaring light of happiness looks like, after so much time in the dark? Could the boy she fell in love with help, or hurt?
Read this book and tell 10 of your friends about it and you will either get kissed or asked out. If you break this chain your crush will die.
Darkly humorous and casually devastating, this autobiographical collage reads like a locked, hot pink Y2K diary full of suburban darkness, chronicling Diana's Myspace-era coming of age. As she makes the transition from numbed-out teen to young adult, she finds herself unable to move forward in her own tale of romantic love. To find her future, she has to come to terms with and take back a childhood ripped off by incest and abuse.
Each essay puts dark memories in new outfits: late-night confessions to AIM chatbot SmarterChild, every romantic first for better or for worse, police reports, found poems from therapy, and conversations of a Vietnamese family marked by cycles of violence.
Experience the hot, chaotic world of a trauma-fractured girl on a quest to find out if happiness—and not just technical survival—is possible. But how will she know what the bright, glaring light of happiness looks like, after so much time in the dark? Could the boy she fell in love with help, or hurt?
Read this book and tell 10 of your friends about it and you will either get kissed or asked out. If you break this chain your crush will die.
176 pages, Paperback
Published October 5, 2021
24 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 5, 2021
I was very lucky enough to receive an ARC copy of this book and I finished it in one sitting! The references to indie pop culture, books, and films made me really excited and I even bookmarked every single mention of media (music, books, films) as a recommendation list. The way that the text is formatted was something I had never seen before but it made the reading experience much more smooth and pleasurable.
There were a lot of parts of the memoir that had me in tears. I am in love with the way Diana writes; the way she articulates her thoughts and the use of figurative language was just so perfect. One of my favorite parts was when Diana described how her and her two sisters took turns "wearing the pain" [of trauma].
It's hard to put into words how great this book was. I, unlike Diana, am not the most talented writer. However, I can say that this is a definitely a must-read for teen girls, survivors of family trauma, and Asian Americans. '
One last thing: this memoir contains themes of sexual assault, domestic violence, police, abuse, and substance abuse. Diana dealt with a lot of heavy shit in her life, therefore, a lot of heavy shit is talked about in this book.
There were a lot of parts of the memoir that had me in tears. I am in love with the way Diana writes; the way she articulates her thoughts and the use of figurative language was just so perfect. One of my favorite parts was when Diana described how her and her two sisters took turns "wearing the pain" [of trauma].
It's hard to put into words how great this book was. I, unlike Diana, am not the most talented writer. However, I can say that this is a definitely a must-read for teen girls, survivors of family trauma, and Asian Americans. '
One last thing: this memoir contains themes of sexual assault, domestic violence, police, abuse, and substance abuse. Diana dealt with a lot of heavy shit in her life, therefore, a lot of heavy shit is talked about in this book.
October 5, 2021
this book is gorgeous, inventive, audacious and funny. a digital-era Amelia's Notebook for hot bitches who've seen shit and survived to tell the tale. essays that build narratives and immortalize legacies (of violence, of perseverance, of what it means to be a Good Woman) then peel them apart to re-fill the cracks. 100% recommend (to fans of alt lit and daring structural choices, readers of elissa washuta, 'reformed' emo girls & more) because there's nothing quite like it.
December 13, 2023
A Sad Girl Survival Story
I had to read this book as part of a mixed tutorial/literature class for my creative writing MFA, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. My teacher was really big on experimental literature--think collections of impressionistic short takes rather than regular prose narrative and gleeful blurring of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and you'll get approximately the idea. This certainly doesn't feel like High Literature, and I'm not sure if it works as an experiment. Because, setting aside the playful formalism and the literary conceit, this is ultimately a heartfelt exploration of one outwardly sad and fragile but inwardly extremely tough girl's childhood of abuse and adulthood of fighting for personal and professional success.
Le writes her memoir in a very unconventional style. I think she is deliberately going for a teen girl diary vibe, based on the cover art of a cartoonish Asian-American emo girl and a mock lined notebook in the background. Reading the book, I definitely got the impression of a young emo girl pasting together a collage to reveal in full the pain of her life. From short snippets detailing the daily horrors of living with an alcoholic stepfather to longform reminisces on her failed romantic relationships, from lists of her media preferences to police reports and an interview with her Vietnamese immigrant mother, Le's life comes together in bits and pieces. It can feel chaotic at times, but Le seems to know what she's doing. The essays are clearly constructed very deliberately, and she can sometimes surprise the reader with a surprisingly clever turn of language or a deep or devastating insight into herself or others at their worst (or sometimes, their best). In many cases, Le doesn't overly comment: she lets the details stand for themselves, and quite frankly, they are intense. Despite all the careful construction, though, what really shines through is Le's openhearted, unguarded sincerity.
The big flaw for this book, I'd say, is that while Le's fragmentary style, which relies more on listing and found documents than straightforward personal narration, is clever and definitely captures the fragmented and traumatized nature of her life, it prevents the book from really achieving its full potential as a memoir per se. Any of the topics that Le presents, like immigrant experiences, intergenerational trauma, survivorship, the role of media in teen life, and the deeper roots to why she (and other Elder Emos) express sadness in such an exaggerated and performative manner, could have easily been expanded to give a more full and universally resonant insight. Le had a lot of big ideas to work with, and certainly knows how to tell an anecdote with biting poetry. But I felt like the structure she used drowned out the really important and universal parts of her story in a sea of at-random personal details. Le has harrowing experiences and a fine authorial voice. A more conventional childhood adversity memoir, while perhaps blunting her structural creativity, would have, I think, served her far better.
I had to read this book as part of a mixed tutorial/literature class for my creative writing MFA, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. My teacher was really big on experimental literature--think collections of impressionistic short takes rather than regular prose narrative and gleeful blurring of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and you'll get approximately the idea. This certainly doesn't feel like High Literature, and I'm not sure if it works as an experiment. Because, setting aside the playful formalism and the literary conceit, this is ultimately a heartfelt exploration of one outwardly sad and fragile but inwardly extremely tough girl's childhood of abuse and adulthood of fighting for personal and professional success.
Le writes her memoir in a very unconventional style. I think she is deliberately going for a teen girl diary vibe, based on the cover art of a cartoonish Asian-American emo girl and a mock lined notebook in the background. Reading the book, I definitely got the impression of a young emo girl pasting together a collage to reveal in full the pain of her life. From short snippets detailing the daily horrors of living with an alcoholic stepfather to longform reminisces on her failed romantic relationships, from lists of her media preferences to police reports and an interview with her Vietnamese immigrant mother, Le's life comes together in bits and pieces. It can feel chaotic at times, but Le seems to know what she's doing. The essays are clearly constructed very deliberately, and she can sometimes surprise the reader with a surprisingly clever turn of language or a deep or devastating insight into herself or others at their worst (or sometimes, their best). In many cases, Le doesn't overly comment: she lets the details stand for themselves, and quite frankly, they are intense. Despite all the careful construction, though, what really shines through is Le's openhearted, unguarded sincerity.
The big flaw for this book, I'd say, is that while Le's fragmentary style, which relies more on listing and found documents than straightforward personal narration, is clever and definitely captures the fragmented and traumatized nature of her life, it prevents the book from really achieving its full potential as a memoir per se. Any of the topics that Le presents, like immigrant experiences, intergenerational trauma, survivorship, the role of media in teen life, and the deeper roots to why she (and other Elder Emos) express sadness in such an exaggerated and performative manner, could have easily been expanded to give a more full and universally resonant insight. Le had a lot of big ideas to work with, and certainly knows how to tell an anecdote with biting poetry. But I felt like the structure she used drowned out the really important and universal parts of her story in a sea of at-random personal details. Le has harrowing experiences and a fine authorial voice. A more conventional childhood adversity memoir, while perhaps blunting her structural creativity, would have, I think, served her far better.
May 20, 2023
This was a great and dark book. I liked the structure for starting with her general depression habits (the comments about her performing her sadness on social media were too real) but then going into her entire personal and family history. Even if it wasn't a traditional memoir, I felt like I got to know her. I appreciated the interviews with her mother.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews