You Get What You Pay for: Essays -- Morgan Parker, Hardcover

In her "witty and searing" first essay collection, award-winning poet Morgan Parker examines "the cultural legacy of Black womanhood and the meaning of finding 'well-being' in a world that wasn't built for you" (Vogue).

"Riveting and deeply personal . . . filled with poignant insights."--Cosmopolitan

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to a battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyperawareness stemming from the effects of slavery.

In a collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist, Parker examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages. She touches on such topics as the ubiquity of beauty standards that exclude Black women, 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 memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche--and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

Author: Morgan Parker
Publisher: One World
Published: 03/12/2024
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.49h x 5.69w x 0.91d
ISBN: 9780525511441

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 10/01/2023 pg. 25
Kirkus Reviews 12/15/2023
Booklist 02/15/2024 pg. 10
Publishers Weekly 04/15/2024

About the Author
Morgan Parker's debut book of essays, You Get What You Pay For, will be released March 12, 2024. She also is the author of young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.