A Year of Nonfiction: Exploring the Lives and Experiences of Women and Their Stories

In this year's nonfiction reading challenge, I had the opportunity to dive into four thought-provoking books that explored the lives and experiences of women. From narratives about women to memoirs about people with illnesses, these books offered a range of perspectives and insights that left me with much to think about.

One of the books that stood out to me was "Not That Kind of Girl" by Lena Dunham. In this narrative about women, Dunham explores the expectations placed on women's bodies, particularly in terms of their sexuality and appearance. She writes candidly about her own experiences growing up as a young woman in America, sharing stories about the ways in which societal norms can be both limiting and suffocating. Through her writing, Dunham sheds light on the complexities of female identity and the ways in which women are often held to unrealistic standards.

Dunham's exploration of these themes is a powerful commentary on the cultural landscape we live in today. She reminds us that our expectations about women's bodies are not only outdated but also damaging, perpetuating a culture of objectification and shame. By sharing her own story, Dunham offers a nuanced and empathetic portrayal of what it means to be a woman in America, one that challenges the reader to rethink their assumptions about female identity.

The next book I read was "The Bright Hour" by Nina Riggs, a memoir about her experience with cancer and her relationship with her mother. Riggs' writing is beautiful and poignant, conveying the complexity of her emotions as she navigated a diagnosis of terminal illness. Through this memoir, Riggs shares her thoughts on mortality, love, and the ways in which we approach death when faced with our own mortality.

Riggs' experience is both heart-wrenching and deeply moving, offering a profound exploration of what it means to live with cancer and to face one's own mortality. Her writing is infused with a deep sense of empathy and compassion, conveying the complexity of her emotions as she navigated this difficult time. This memoir is a powerful reminder that even in the darkest moments, there is beauty to be found.

The final book I read was "They Call Us Monsters" by Morgan Jerkins, an essay collection that explores issues of feminism, racism, and identity. Jerkins' writing is sharp and insightful, offering a nuanced exploration of what it means to be black and female in America. Through her essays, Jerkins critiques the notion of white feminism, arguing that this approach can be both exclusionary and limiting.

Jerkins' central argument is that women's experiences cannot be reduced to a single category or definition. Rather, our individual experiences are shaped by a complex array of factors, including racism, sexism, and classism. Through her writing, Jerkins challenges readers to think critically about the concept of universality, arguing that this term can often be used as a euphemism for whiteness.

Jerkins' essay collection is both timely and thought-provoking, offering a powerful critique of the ways in which we approach identity and experience. Her writing is clear and concise, conveying complex ideas with ease. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in feminist theory or critical race studies.

My final book was "One Day, We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter" by Sachi Cole, an essay collection that explores the complexities of identity, culture, and belonging. Cole's writing is both humorous and profound, offering a nuanced exploration of what it means to be Indian and Canadian. Through her essays, Cole critiques the notion of assimilation, arguing that our individual experiences are shaped by a complex array of factors, including culture, family, and identity.

Cole's essay collection is both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, conveying the complexity of her emotions as she navigated her own experiences as an Indian-Canadian woman. Her writing is infused with a deep sense of empathy and compassion, offering a powerful exploration of what it means to belong to multiple cultures. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring identity and culture.

Overall, I found these books to be thought-provoking and insightful explorations of the lives and experiences of women. Each book offered a unique perspective on the world we live in today, challenging readers to think critically about issues such as feminism, racism, and identity. Through their writing, these authors shed light on the complexities of female experience, offering powerful commentary on the cultural landscape we inhabit.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi I'm Kendra Winchester welcome back to my channel and today I'm gonna be doing my nonfiction November wrap-up so I have read 1 2 3 4 5 6 books I think we're nonfiction November so that's pretty good I'm pretty happy with that actually read and watch the books on my TBR which is like first so I've read there's one book that I didn't read but I think it's gonna be more of a long-term read because it's basically a info-dump and that's fine with me cuz all about making a book at any rate you're here to listen to my books that I have read so we're gonna start with evicted by matthew desmond is out from crown and this won the Pulitzer for nonfiction this is Matthew went and lived with people who were in low-income housing and he says in his conclusion that most of the studies being done on people who live in low-income housing are ones who have government assistance but he wanted to look at people who do not have government assistance in the housing area like they might get Social Security or something but they don't actually get like housing vouchers or whatever so I wish he had mentioned some of that in the beginning and the introduction and maybe he did and I just missed it I think that really would have given me a framework to look at this so he's looking at several different families and different types of low-income housing and the landlords as well and how it's like a profitable kind of industry to fiction is like a business essentially and so I really had no idea what it looked like and so he does an amazing job with that but I really appreciated the framework that he added at the end in his conclusion and the way he talked about his process and how he went and followed the people and how he found them in different things and I really just pulled it all together for me I felt like there were so many different threads through this book that I could get very confusing and so at the end when he just like said pulled them all together and just made this cohesive whole argument and thought process I thought it was really well done so there are some urgent families from all different walks of life and they live in like trailer parks or a permanent complexes that aren't even up to code and he talks about the laws and just a lot of the red tape and and I feel like he talked about the psychology and you know the psychological damage that can come from growing up in low-income housing and that just kind of how poverty affects you psychologically I felt that he could go into that a little bit more but I think probably because I picked that up on some comments that he may close at the end that perhaps he did all the way through the book and I just missed it but really there are only a few quibbles that I have with this book it is really very very good and the best book that I've read on the topic so you'll definitely want to go check out this book by Matthew Desmond the next book that I read is the rules not apply but Aria levy and this is a memoir about her life and kind of how it fell apart so she and her wife were together for like ten years and then she was pregnant and she lost the baby and she tells you all this at the beginning and then they have to sell their house for different reasons so basically her life falls apart and so we go backwards in time and follow her life up to that point I felt like sometimes like she kind of got off topic but her writing on a sentence level is just so incredibly beautiful it's like nine-year perfect it's just so I don't know it just flows it's so conversational it's really really well done and this is a really short memoir but I think she packs a lot of meaning into the story and I think she even could have cut some parts out to make it more streamline but maybe that wouldn't have given enough meat I don't know but the way that she talks about her experience is very well done she doesn't let herself off the hook for her own problems and the baggage that she brought to the marriage and then the affair that she had and different things and she doesn't let herself off the hook at the same time she acknowledges like it takes two to tango so like she also talks about her partner's issues and different things I feel like that was really well balanced the only real issue that I struggled with was that as a you know upper middle-class white woman she has a lot of privilege that has never really acknowledged in the book at all so she's able to pick up her life at the end of this book and move forward because she has money and because she has those privileges and to go forth and move forward and I feel like that's not really acknowledged enough at all in the book I don't think she ever actually mentions it and like so talk about money problems and like they're just living on such a higher level but besides that I feel like she captured a lot of genuine emotion and very just very real problems that she had she just attacked those head-on and you know she did experience a lot of horrible things in her life and how that how she deals with grief and you know grieving you know a miscarriage and what that looks like and what that feels like and I thought she did a great job on that so um yeah I will overall I would definitely check out this book but don't if you were experiencing any of those things because this would probably be not the greatest book to read at that time the other book I read is too fat too too loud the rise and reign of the unruly woman um this book takes a look at different celebrities of different kinds so like Serena Williams Melissa McCarthy Nicki Minaj Kim Kardashian and just different things they did to go against the traditional narrative that we have about women so I found this book really interesting and I'd be honest I didn't have a lot of high expectations about this book just because of my own I don't I don't really like books about celebrities but I thought she did such a great job of taking a person that we have all these stereotypes in our heads about and turning it on its head so for example Kim Kardashian I don't really follow the hope the Kardashians and I only really read about her when she does something you know extra extra and she talked about how when she was pregnant with our first child that she didn't wear maternity clothes and she didn't try to look cute and feminine in the traditional way that we expect women to perform pregnancy and she just pointed out different random things throughout the book like that and I really was like oh okay these are really great thoughts on this topic and I really enjoyed that that being said I feel like that that all of this could have been communicated in like maybe a shorter essay and maybe you could argue that each chapter is essentially an say about that particular topic and while I did find a lot of information interesting you know it probably could have been a little bit shorter but it was if you are interested in narratives about women and how you know some things that we don't even realize that we have expectations about how women are supposed to behave this is a great book to read and so overall I would definitely recommend this book and it just you just really did a great job at observing different things like that the next book is the bright hour by Nina Riggs this is about her experience with cancer and how eventually that she passed away from cancer her mom also had cancer and passed away during the course of this book but this really is just a memoir about her experience and facing you know she's know she's going to die and what does she do about that what do you do when you know you're going to die and you just don't know how much time that you have left and it's just a really beautiful memoir it kind of reminded me of a female version of when breath becomes air but this is really a more mother's perspective she has two sons and just the way that her sons deal with her cancer and how she talks to them about the cancer I just felt was really meaningful so I really enjoyed this book and she has a lot of great points of what it's like to live with a long-term illness and what people say to you and what do you say to them and how do you explain it to people and overall yes I really enjoyed this and she actually is quite you know she's a good writer or be granted if you read this you will need all the tissues so just be aware this is not really something to read when you're already down but if you were really interested in memoirs about people with illnesses or cancer or different things definitely check out this next book I read for nonfiction November is this will be my undoing by Morgan Jerkins living at the intersection of black female and feminists in white America so I think that she says a great point in the beginning of the book she says I say that this 1-sided feminism white feminism is dead this book is not about all women but it's meant for all women and men and those who do not adhere to the gender binary it is for you you our black just doesn't distance us from other women however it does distinguish us and this requires further understanding and I just love the way that she talks about her experience as a black woman and you know she points out you know a lot of writers like black writers when they write are writing for a quote-unquote wider audience i RIE a whiter audience in that you know when they write they're just keeping that in mind and so not actually writing as a black person to other black people but she I think does that in this book I think she just such a great job of pointing that out though that a lot of times we expect the you know the white audience to be the default audience and that all things should be more Universal and she really addresses that idea of what is universality when people actually mean just whiteness and they actually mean writing for white people book so she says all of that and more way more elegantly than I just paraphrase so definitely go check out her book and all of the thoughts that she has there I think she does a great job of explaining it especially the essay on universality is just wonderful and I think she did a great job with that so definitely go check this out I'm sure feel like there there's probably a little bit of something new for everyone to learn from in this book the last book I have to talk about is another essay collection it's by Sachi Cole and that is one day while we did and none of this will matter this is a really hilarious essay collection just what it's like to be Indian and Canadian and just being the daughter of immigrants and she was a lot of wonderful thoughts it's also really hilarious Sachi Cole has such a great way of expressing herself though I really love the way that she expresses herself and just talks about things and she's able to get really serious points across and a really just humorous way and I feel like that often is a great way to help communicate your your feeling so I feel like she takes the opposite strategy of Morgan Jerkins but they both have such wonderful and great points about what is like to be their ethnicity and so it's just a nice range of difference and talent and skill that goes into those so that is all of the nonfiction books that I read for a nonfiction November have you read any of these because I don't know I felt like I saw them on Instagram a lot and I just never got around to reading them so I feel like I'm playing a little catch up on my nonfiction this month but I feel like I did a pretty good job with that so definitely tell me your thoughts and feelings if you have any of these on your TBR and I guess I will see you next timehi I'm Kendra Winchester welcome back to my channel and today I'm gonna be doing my nonfiction November wrap-up so I have read 1 2 3 4 5 6 books I think we're nonfiction November so that's pretty good I'm pretty happy with that actually read and watch the books on my TBR which is like first so I've read there's one book that I didn't read but I think it's gonna be more of a long-term read because it's basically a info-dump and that's fine with me cuz all about making a book at any rate you're here to listen to my books that I have read so we're gonna start with evicted by matthew desmond is out from crown and this won the Pulitzer for nonfiction this is Matthew went and lived with people who were in low-income housing and he says in his conclusion that most of the studies being done on people who live in low-income housing are ones who have government assistance but he wanted to look at people who do not have government assistance in the housing area like they might get Social Security or something but they don't actually get like housing vouchers or whatever so I wish he had mentioned some of that in the beginning and the introduction and maybe he did and I just missed it I think that really would have given me a framework to look at this so he's looking at several different families and different types of low-income housing and the landlords as well and how it's like a profitable kind of industry to fiction is like a business essentially and so I really had no idea what it looked like and so he does an amazing job with that but I really appreciated the framework that he added at the end in his conclusion and the way he talked about his process and how he went and followed the people and how he found them in different things and I really just pulled it all together for me I felt like there were so many different threads through this book that I could get very confusing and so at the end when he just like said pulled them all together and just made this cohesive whole argument and thought process I thought it was really well done so there are some urgent families from all different walks of life and they live in like trailer parks or a permanent complexes that aren't even up to code and he talks about the laws and just a lot of the red tape and and I feel like he talked about the psychology and you know the psychological damage that can come from growing up in low-income housing and that just kind of how poverty affects you psychologically I felt that he could go into that a little bit more but I think probably because I picked that up on some comments that he may close at the end that perhaps he did all the way through the book and I just missed it but really there are only a few quibbles that I have with this book it is really very very good and the best book that I've read on the topic so you'll definitely want to go check out this book by Matthew Desmond the next book that I read is the rules not apply but Aria levy and this is a memoir about her life and kind of how it fell apart so she and her wife were together for like ten years and then she was pregnant and she lost the baby and she tells you all this at the beginning and then they have to sell their house for different reasons so basically her life falls apart and so we go backwards in time and follow her life up to that point I felt like sometimes like she kind of got off topic but her writing on a sentence level is just so incredibly beautiful it's like nine-year perfect it's just so I don't know it just flows it's so conversational it's really really well done and this is a really short memoir but I think she packs a lot of meaning into the story and I think she even could have cut some parts out to make it more streamline but maybe that wouldn't have given enough meat I don't know but the way that she talks about her experience is very well done she doesn't let herself off the hook for her own problems and the baggage that she brought to the marriage and then the affair that she had and different things and she doesn't let herself off the hook at the same time she acknowledges like it takes two to tango so like she also talks about her partner's issues and different things I feel like that was really well balanced the only real issue that I struggled with was that as a you know upper middle-class white woman she has a lot of privilege that has never really acknowledged in the book at all so she's able to pick up her life at the end of this book and move forward because she has money and because she has those privileges and to go forth and move forward and I feel like that's not really acknowledged enough at all in the book I don't think she ever actually mentions it and like so talk about money problems and like they're just living on such a higher level but besides that I feel like she captured a lot of genuine emotion and very just very real problems that she had she just attacked those head-on and you know she did experience a lot of horrible things in her life and how that how she deals with grief and you know grieving you know a miscarriage and what that looks like and what that feels like and I thought she did a great job on that so um yeah I will overall I would definitely check out this book but don't if you were experiencing any of those things because this would probably be not the greatest book to read at that time the other book I read is too fat too too loud the rise and reign of the unruly woman um this book takes a look at different celebrities of different kinds so like Serena Williams Melissa McCarthy Nicki Minaj Kim Kardashian and just different things they did to go against the traditional narrative that we have about women so I found this book really interesting and I'd be honest I didn't have a lot of high expectations about this book just because of my own I don't I don't really like books about celebrities but I thought she did such a great job of taking a person that we have all these stereotypes in our heads about and turning it on its head so for example Kim Kardashian I don't really follow the hope the Kardashians and I only really read about her when she does something you know extra extra and she talked about how when she was pregnant with our first child that she didn't wear maternity clothes and she didn't try to look cute and feminine in the traditional way that we expect women to perform pregnancy and she just pointed out different random things throughout the book like that and I really was like oh okay these are really great thoughts on this topic and I really enjoyed that that being said I feel like that that all of this could have been communicated in like maybe a shorter essay and maybe you could argue that each chapter is essentially an say about that particular topic and while I did find a lot of information interesting you know it probably could have been a little bit shorter but it was if you are interested in narratives about women and how you know some things that we don't even realize that we have expectations about how women are supposed to behave this is a great book to read and so overall I would definitely recommend this book and it just you just really did a great job at observing different things like that the next book is the bright hour by Nina Riggs this is about her experience with cancer and how eventually that she passed away from cancer her mom also had cancer and passed away during the course of this book but this really is just a memoir about her experience and facing you know she's know she's going to die and what does she do about that what do you do when you know you're going to die and you just don't know how much time that you have left and it's just a really beautiful memoir it kind of reminded me of a female version of when breath becomes air but this is really a more mother's perspective she has two sons and just the way that her sons deal with her cancer and how she talks to them about the cancer I just felt was really meaningful so I really enjoyed this book and she has a lot of great points of what it's like to live with a long-term illness and what people say to you and what do you say to them and how do you explain it to people and overall yes I really enjoyed this and she actually is quite you know she's a good writer or be granted if you read this you will need all the tissues so just be aware this is not really something to read when you're already down but if you were really interested in memoirs about people with illnesses or cancer or different things definitely check out this next book I read for nonfiction November is this will be my undoing by Morgan Jerkins living at the intersection of black female and feminists in white America so I think that she says a great point in the beginning of the book she says I say that this 1-sided feminism white feminism is dead this book is not about all women but it's meant for all women and men and those who do not adhere to the gender binary it is for you you our black just doesn't distance us from other women however it does distinguish us and this requires further understanding and I just love the way that she talks about her experience as a black woman and you know she points out you know a lot of writers like black writers when they write are writing for a quote-unquote wider audience i RIE a whiter audience in that you know when they write they're just keeping that in mind and so not actually writing as a black person to other black people but she I think does that in this book I think she just such a great job of pointing that out though that a lot of times we expect the you know the white audience to be the default audience and that all things should be more Universal and she really addresses that idea of what is universality when people actually mean just whiteness and they actually mean writing for white people book so she says all of that and more way more elegantly than I just paraphrase so definitely go check out her book and all of the thoughts that she has there I think she does a great job of explaining it especially the essay on universality is just wonderful and I think she did a great job with that so definitely go check this out I'm sure feel like there there's probably a little bit of something new for everyone to learn from in this book the last book I have to talk about is another essay collection it's by Sachi Cole and that is one day while we did and none of this will matter this is a really hilarious essay collection just what it's like to be Indian and Canadian and just being the daughter of immigrants and she was a lot of wonderful thoughts it's also really hilarious Sachi Cole has such a great way of expressing herself though I really love the way that she expresses herself and just talks about things and she's able to get really serious points across and a really just humorous way and I feel like that often is a great way to help communicate your your feeling so I feel like she takes the opposite strategy of Morgan Jerkins but they both have such wonderful and great points about what is like to be their ethnicity and so it's just a nice range of difference and talent and skill that goes into those so that is all of the nonfiction books that I read for a nonfiction November have you read any of these because I don't know I felt like I saw them on Instagram a lot and I just never got around to reading them so I feel like I'm playing a little catch up on my nonfiction this month but I feel like I did a pretty good job with that so definitely tell me your thoughts and feelings if you have any of these on your TBR and I guess I will see you next time\n"