Disgust: A Memoir

by Stephanie Grant

"When, in my twenties, I came out to my parents as a lesbian, I became an object of their disgust. As a result, I worked to eliminate disgust from my repertoire of emotions."
In this hybrid memoir, novelist Stephanie Grant works to make sense of three generations of female self-disgust in her family while considering how it challenges both the American ideal of equality and our real-life experiences of intimacy. A Memoir is funny, tender, and rigorous in its exploration of how the most difficult emotion functions both in our private lives and our collective imaginations.

Genres: Memoir, LGBT, Nonfiction

170 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2021

About the author

There is more than one Stephanie Grant on Goodreads

Stephanie Grant’s first novel, The Passion of Alice, was published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin, and was nominated for Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. Map of Ireland, which was published by Scribner in March 2008, is a contemporary retelling of Huck Finn that places female sexuality and friendship at the center of one of our foundational myths about race.

Her writing has received numerous awards including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Formerly Writer-in-Residence at Mount Holyoke College, she is currently Visiting Writer at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

For the author of GCSE review guides, please refer to Stephanie Grant

Reviews

[Ben Truax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant, grounded, a vivid exploration of emotion and family, this little hybrid memoir is carefully crafted and utterly engaging! A fast read that you'll want to digest slowly.

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thoughtful intriguing meditation on disgust structured as a sort of segmented essay; exploration of disgust allows Grant to range through biographical time, from her childhood, to coming out, to being a parent, to having a lover. I was moved by the personal stories, and the reflections on the meaning of disgust were surprising and made me reconsider what I thought I know about this phenomena. The book is compelling, the writing smart, and the insights meaningful.

[Alex Zaky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Generally I don’t rate books I read by people I know or have met in real life but i couldn’t not because this book was beautiful and brutal. someone else said a quick read that you’ll want to digest slowly and yeah true.
anyway some lines i enjoyed
-but isn’t it always nearly impossible, in retrospect, to explain desire?
-gratitude is, if not a form of love, one of our best means of practicing it.
- i’m pretty sure he thought that i, too, was a spy.
- i’m not sure i can answer this, although i have some theories. so do many people in my life. have theories.
- the unnameable american future that i’ve long feared seems irrevocably at hand
- mostly, i experienced relief that the mystery of who she was had been solved.
-we are always looping, never beginning. never quite at the start of something.
- that evening has a quality of unreality to it, as if it happened to someone else’s daughter, and i am privy only to the story’s telling.
-she was relieved to have relinquished responsibility for her physical self… and relieved, too, not to have to witness my response to what she’d done.
- what i’m still unable to discern… is whether they can’t forgive the mother that she wasn’t - or the mother that she was.
- i restrain myself, though the words do come to mind, and my lips do form their outline.
- 3.32
- i am trying- has the reader already guessed?- to understand my own interest in disgust, as if it were a choice. as if it, too, weren’t overdetermined.
- perhaps the opposite of disgust, if disgust has an opposite, is compassion.
- the texture-less air is a kind of foothold where i cannot gain purchase
- but my calculations and strategies, my hysterical insights and judicious feelings are swept aside, they do not matter, they never matter, and this is the real pain of childhood.
- it is my chief pleasure, my singular joy: both the despising and my expert hiding of it.
- this claim is, at once, performance, hyperbole, and truth.
- the shame, if you will, of having a body at all.
- how do i live in this body? that is, how do i live in this now, in this body?
- this did not feel like protest; it felt like annihilation.
- loving someone requires much more than sweetness, requires a kind of grueling muscularity
- by untrue i mean: a story i tell myself to feel better.
- there is no intimacy without disgust. and this is the real pain of relationships.
-6.41
- and perhaps because, against all reason, we have persisted in these bodies, whose contagion of meaning appears to be without end.

[Talia · Rating 3 out of 5]

concept fell short 2.5 rounded up

[cowboy · Rating 1 out of 5]

in her despicable memoir (which dares itself to be called such a thing) DISGUST, stephanie grant makes a complete mockery of herself, puppeteering her miseries into one of the most cruel, uninspired and self-indulgent things i have ever read. in a performative, sardonic tone, grant morphs into the “unlikable female character” trope popularized in modern autofiction, making a complete fool and caricature of herself in the process. she alleges the goal of exploring the topic of “disgust” throughout her memoir, a feeling and concept that has plagued her life since coming out as a lesbian to her mother. this idea, exploring one’s sexuality alongside the concept of disgust and the subsequent interpolation of the two, seems to be the framework for the memoir and, with the right execution, could have made for a very compelling read. instead, grant produces a compilation of thoughts, confessions and accounts of things so evil and deplorable, that it will introduce the concept of shame as a very necessary one, and have you questioning the idea of free speech in the first place. if grant is attempting to be cheeky and lascivious in the guise of being “honest” and/or “vulnerable,” she has failed miserably.

i have always gravitated towards controversial media as an outlet to communicate the things i don’t want to say. it’s been an innate interest of mine since i was young and subjectivity is one of the highest qualities i value when it comes to art. yet this abomination of a memoir is offensive on all ends of the spectrum (liberal, conservative, gay, straight, religious, agnostic) that there is no other reading of it that constitutes any praise. i, along with 18 or so other undergraduate students was a victim of this horrendous piece of shit and have never seen a book collectively outrage (and unite) a classroom as much as this one.

it would be selfish to call myself and my classmates the biggest victims of this book. if her diatribes about lesbian bed death, repulsion for her wife and masochistic attraction to a male war veteran aren’t off putting enough, she devotes an entire section to terrorizing her daughter. treating her as a fictional character of her own, she depicts the deepest tragedies and darkest moments one suffering from mental illness can experience, all while saying shit like “i despise anyone whose child is well” with an obnoxious smirk. comparing her daughter’s habit of self-mutilation to pencil shavings, depicting her overdose and traumatizing experience at a mental hospital, but giving her the grace of redacting her name since any further exposition into her identity is off limits.

that isn’t even the worst of it, grant truly leaves no provocative topic untouched, moving herself like a chess piece across a board of contention. in the inexplicably titled section “guardian of the mouth,” grant confesses her odd obsession with anorexia, a subject to which she devoted her entire first novel to, which she advertises for over five pages. upon confessing she has never dealt with anorexia herself, she continues by issuing it a metaphorical stamp, “guardian of the mouth,” equates it as tantamount to poverty and starts comparing it to sex.

how am i supposed to separate the “art” (which this war crime of a book is not) from the “artist” (this woman should never be given access to a publishing house again) when the book is framed around grant’s confessional vulnerability? there is no separation to be made here, i can only assume grant is plagued by the irreparable psychosis she paints her daughter as having suffered from, or is a truly repugnant and exploitative mother, woman and author.

[Sarah Schulman]

This is a small book of confessions and some are very blunt and somewhat startling. It feels like a work that could be considered New Narrative, and resonates with the work of Dodie Bellamy or Robert Gluck. She evokes the childhood missing of one's mother so well it was painful to read. An admirable effort to tell the truth and cohere a self.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible little book about loving, parenting, and growing up. Stephanie Grant's writing is spare and nuanced in all the best ways. She gave me hope for my own abilities to tolerate the inevitable discomforts in any relationship, but in particular, the challenges of parenting today's kids.

[Alvaro Velez Fuentes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn’t a memoir that gives you easy answers or neat resolutions. Instead, it invites you to think—about your own reactions, your boundaries, and the stories we tell ourselves about what is acceptable or “clean.” At times it’s uncomfortable, but never gratuitous. The discomfort feels purposeful.

[E.J. Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fleet & affecting meditation on disgust that seems equally to be a meditation on grief. Recommended.