Wish You Were Me
Wish You Were Me (Myriam Gurba, Future Tense Books 2011, 45 pages)
A Smalldoggies book review by Rick Klaras
Wish You Were Me, a chapbook of short stories, musings, and prose, is the latest work from Myriam Gurba, author of Dahlia Season. It is the type of honest that almost makes you cringe, makes you feel like you should listen closely for footsteps or the author might catch you reading it. It feels private.
Some of the pieces in this book invoke in me a feeling of secret mirth, of peering hot-eared between the fingers of my own Scandinavian bashfulness. Gurba puts herself in a really vulnerable place in Wish You Were Me. It's this boldness, this willingness to allow total strangers to gawk at the author's unadorned humanity that makes this book shocking, but at the same time, really engaging and funny.
Wish You Were Me covers a lot of ground. In “Impostor,” Gurba lists the things that would make her a “better lesbian” (suffering fibromyalgia, hoarding animals, owning sandals), her experiences dating men (including a wonderful moment of self-recognition in the mirror of another in the section of “BOYFRIEND” about the soft-spoken black boy from Modern American Lit class), what it's like to be a history teacher in L.A. County (“Saint Olaf's Revenge” and “Teaching to the Stars”), and her embarrassing experiences with plumbers in “Irrigation.”
Myriam Gurba is not scared of getting messy when it comes to social issues. In its short length, Wish You Were Me untangles some of the complexities of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, and mental health, but it does so in such a brazen way that it doesn't ever come off as a “lesbian book” or a “book by someone with Tourette's.” It's multi-faceted, a curio collection of the miscellany that makes us all such animals of chance.
If you're a Republican, Wish You Were Me will turn you gay. If you're a gay Republican, it will turn you Polish. It will leave you red-faced and chuckling, and if you're not too squeamish, is certainly worth a read.
I'll close with one of my favorite passages:
From PART ONE: FUCKING GAY
"My Grandma Told Your Grandma, “I'm Gonna Set Yo Ass On Fire!”
I have a good grandma and a bitch grandma. Lots of people have
a bitch grandma. She looks like a normal old lady, except she's
a total cunt. If you don't believe I have a bitch grandma, and you
think I'm an exaggerator, consider that my bitch grandma told my
sister, when she first got out of the hospital, “You could've used
some more time at the Fat Farm.” My sister was being treated for
anorexia.
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Learn more about Myriam Gurba at her site.