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"Unspeakable" by Harriet Shawcross (2019)
Oct. 18th, 2019 08:02 pm"Unspeakable: the things we cannot say".
I really wanted to like this book more, because I have/had selective mutism, and I'm queer. The author is bisexual and had a period of silence during her adolescence. Some parts did work for me, and the prose was nice. Other parts did not work for me at all.
This book is somewhere between memoir and investigative or journalistic non-fiction. The memoir provides a frame for the journalistic parts. This combination is like a spork: half as good as a spoon, half as good as a fork. I wanted either more detail and emotion around the author's experiences, or more in-depth investigation of the topics she was exploring. Her topics are wide-ranging: the Samaritans, silent religious mediation, talk therapy, and more. She really skims through these topics rather quickly.
I liked the chapter on selective mutism, but wanted more interviews and details. I appreciated the chapter about the dangers of meditation, which is an under-reported problem in society and in medicine. I did not like the section on Nepal (concerning people who survived an Earthquake), which seemed to gloss over a lot of subjects. Crucially, for me, the author did not investigate the concept of societal silence and how this can affect people, especially queer people.
I was bothered by the middle section. The author interviews Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues." This section was very cis-centric, blithely equating vaginas with women. In one section, the author discusses the childhood abuse of one George Oppen, her favorite poet. But a couple of times she refers to this abuse as "unwanted advances," a very strange way of discussing childhood sexual abuse. I found it frustrating that the author complained about how people with selective mutism only wanted to communicate by email.
Other content notes include: mention of suicide and self-harm
P.S. I wrote an article about Selective Mutism for FWD (disabledfeminists.com) some years back, but it seems to have disappeared. Can anyone help me find it?
I really wanted to like this book more, because I have/had selective mutism, and I'm queer. The author is bisexual and had a period of silence during her adolescence. Some parts did work for me, and the prose was nice. Other parts did not work for me at all.
This book is somewhere between memoir and investigative or journalistic non-fiction. The memoir provides a frame for the journalistic parts. This combination is like a spork: half as good as a spoon, half as good as a fork. I wanted either more detail and emotion around the author's experiences, or more in-depth investigation of the topics she was exploring. Her topics are wide-ranging: the Samaritans, silent religious mediation, talk therapy, and more. She really skims through these topics rather quickly.
I liked the chapter on selective mutism, but wanted more interviews and details. I appreciated the chapter about the dangers of meditation, which is an under-reported problem in society and in medicine. I did not like the section on Nepal (concerning people who survived an Earthquake), which seemed to gloss over a lot of subjects. Crucially, for me, the author did not investigate the concept of societal silence and how this can affect people, especially queer people.
I was bothered by the middle section. The author interviews Eve Ensler, creator of "The Vagina Monologues." This section was very cis-centric, blithely equating vaginas with women. In one section, the author discusses the childhood abuse of one George Oppen, her favorite poet. But a couple of times she refers to this abuse as "unwanted advances," a very strange way of discussing childhood sexual abuse. I found it frustrating that the author complained about how people with selective mutism only wanted to communicate by email.
Other content notes include: mention of suicide and self-harm
P.S. I wrote an article about Selective Mutism for FWD (disabledfeminists.com) some years back, but it seems to have disappeared. Can anyone help me find it?
