num_pages: 208
description: The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces the trauma and beauty of existing as a Black woman back through American history from the foundational trauma of the slave trade all the way up to Serena Williams and the aftermath of Hurricane KatrinaDubbed a voice of her generation poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation that accompanies being forever-single (as in never having had more than a situationship type of single) in a culture fixated on partnership. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery.In this collection of sharp reflective essays Parker examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages through such topics as the Church's role in propagating segregation through scriptural misreadings the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.With piercing wit and incisive observations You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes this devastating collection paints a portrait of one Black woman's psycheand of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.
language: English
title: You Get What You Pay For
publisher: One World