Be More Bookish - Week 8, Assignment 4

Joy Harjo is an endlessly talented poet, and her prose reflects that. Crazy Brave is more than just an account of Harjo's life, it's a reflection of the depressingly still-present struggles faced by native people in the 1960s and on through to today. Harjo is brutally honest in her descriptions of the adversity and challenges that she faced in her life. The way she describes the abusive home life that she and her mother struggled through echoes a line from one of her poems: "You hold these scenes in front of me/And I was born with eyes that can never close." Her bravery and unwillingness to so much as blink while inviting the reader to confront her step-father with her gives power to one of the strongest narrative voices in writing today. Harjo's prose echoes with native storytelling tradition, as the places she describes manage to be simultaneously real and ethereal, plain and yet magical. Ultimately, Crazy Brave is a story about family and tradition, even if the family isn't the one you're born into, and even if the traditions are the ones that you make.



Chris Gethard is a comedian who proudly describes himself as a loser, claiming that the term "nerd" has been co-opted by the mainstream, and that losers are nerds who don't get to choose to be nerds. With a few minor birth defects, at least one chemical imbalance, and this anti-cool-kid zealotry, Gethard asserts that there was never any other job that he wanted to have. Well, except for professional wrestler, but he addresses that pretty early on in the book. A Bad Idea I'm About to Do doesn't offer any excuses or apologies for the ridiculous moments in the author's life that it catalogs, but it does invite the reader to celebrate everything that makes them losers and to find a way to own it. For example, if major networks aren't interested in casting you in their shows, start your own show on public access television in Manhattan and turn it into a cult hit. "Keep shouting until they're listening," as the theme song of said public access show screams over a house band comprised of four New York City punk legends and one kid they picked from the audience.

Chris Gethard doesn't apologize, but he does track an arc in his life from days of fearless manic depression that made him the life of the party to his realization that he couldn't continue to live that way and still be okay. As a comedian his strong suit has always been storytelling, and that shines through beautifully in every single one of the essays in this book. Gethard's self-deprecating sense of humor treats everyone as a whole person and demonizes no one, whether he's writing about an ex-girlfriend who he pushed away with his crippling depression and anxiety or a roommate who made his life a living hell for a year out of jealousy. Everyone is obviously a real, flawed person from the author's life, and he manages to celebrate those flaws in a way that makes the reader appreciate their own. But maybe that shouldn't be so surprising, because Chris Gethard is all about people proudly flaunting what makes them (according to the opening monologue of his show when it was picked up by a network earlier this year) "goons, goofs, freakazoids, oddballs, the sexually confused, dingbats, dinguses, the socially awkward, people with mild depression, dorks, asthmatics, underdogs, dweebs, people with severe depression, and Jabronies."