Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me
By Bill Hayes
Publication Year: 2017
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: memoir, photography
Read on 2018-09-02
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★★★
I am devastated. I feel like I’ve just lived another, older life, and I feel like I am too young to have done so. I just got to New York but I already feel the ache of the transience of life here. Everyone leaves, everyone dies. But it is beautiful here, and the beautiful moments are infinitely stacked upon one another. Life is too immense for me to grasp.
★★★☆☆ This was good but not as good as everyone says it is? Well-written insofar as it’s a riveting tale, but can’t compare to the memoirs I’ve read by more seasoned writers.
★★★☆☆ Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness.
★★★★☆ Devoured this in a day after re-watching the movie recently, because I was interested in Molly Bloom and also wanted the dirt on the celebs she names. Not quite as self-critical as I personally would’ve preferred and more than a little self-congratulatory/self-absolving in the end.
★★★★★ TLDR: this is the best memoir I have ever read and you must read it, I cried in anger, in joy, in catharsis, I learned, I was moved, shocked, proud - Chanel Miller is a phenomenal writer and immensely talented, smart, sharp, emotionally mature person whose writings and experience on trauma and rape culture and justice you absolutely need to read.
★★★☆☆ This book is a mix of prose, poetry, and memoir, organized as a series of over 200 short vignettes and musings on the colour blue.
★★★★☆ So so good, it’s called Dear Girls to her daughters but for me it was like reading a letter from an Asian American big sister.
★★★★★ A phenomenally thought-provoking collection of essays, musings, and one or two more formalized reporting pieces on queerness and diasporic Asian identity.
★★★★★ It’s 2019 and I honestly forget sometimes that Mindy Kaling was one of the people who literally created The Office.
★★★★★ Anne Carson’s continued mastery of the fragment just makes my gay-ass heart sing. The book is a reproduction of a collage epitaph Carson made for her estranged brother upon his death in the early 2000s.
I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by the author herself, and remember I did in fact cry in a grocery store (not H Mart).